In a log cabin  in the forest there lived an Estonian. That is to say the ancestors of a people who spoke an ancient tongue, east of the Ural mountains, and to be precise, in the Ob river catchment in western Siberia. Pine, spruce and birch forests formed their home, amid rivers, bogs  and lakes, within that vast horizontal band across northern Eurasia called the taiga. To the south lies the steppe, grasslands spreading from Mongolia / China to Ukraine in the west, as far as

Spring has arrived, and the swallows and other birds are already angling to nest in the roof of, and under the eaves of the summer cabin....

I have long wondered whether the ancestors of Finns and Estonians invented the log cabin, and CA Weslager provides an answer. In The Log...

“The secret of Chimneys” is the title of a 1925 murder mystery-romance by Agatha Christie, the prolific British crime writer. It involves...

“The incredible Estonians” was one working title for this project; another, “Living at the edge of free Europe”. How have 1.2 million...

Completing the traditional Estonian regalia of a white peasant shirt or blouse tied at the waist in a woollen belt is a brooch to fasten...

The Estonians I spoke to on our cycling trip in 2023 were strangely uninterested in their own mythology. Kalevipoeg is boring and...

Dirhami was our cycling destination from a camping spot west of Tallinn. It sounded to me like Moroccan currency, at any rate, a word in...

Standing in a field on the island of Saaremaa are five wooden windmills. They make a striking arrangement when viewed from an angle....

Friends in Estonia showed me the ERR website , the state news and broadcasting service, in the hope of my improving my rudimentary...

In Viking tradition, the accomplished person is one who has mastered nine skills. The poet who wrote the list was born in Norway, and...

Asked what Estonians do at their summer houses, I was told they basically chop firewood. There’s more to it, of course: having a sauna,...

“You will be taught the language, our money system, the rights and duties of citizenship, and our social customs before you attempt to...

Among the vast output of books in the Estonian language during the Soviet era is a beautiful coffee table book published in 1983 titled...

Curved blade of Austrian tempered steel attached to an ash shaft, a whetstone of Italian quartz sandstone to hone it, kept in a copper...

Grandma used to plant them, a summer flower having a dandelion-like circle of blue petals. Auntie Johanna had sent her seeds from...

Estonia’s points of difference to the rest of the world have been a running theme in this series of blogposts. One claim is that Uralic...

Mystical and magical is how Estonian tourism websites describe two sandy beaches in Estonia that make melodic sounds in the right...

An English writer’s fantasy epic of a ring of evil power and of a wizard, hobbits, men, a dwarf and an elf who seek to destroy it has...

For a non-PC sport, men moving as fast as they can through an obstacle course carrying a woman on their back would be a prime candidate....