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....

In Estonia, as in much of the world, flickering marsh lights were said to lead unwary travellers to their doom. All the stories describe...

Around 1,300 years ago two boatloads of hardy, young warriors received the shock of their lives on landing at an Estonian island....

Naming a people and the place where they live stamps their identity. Eesti and eesti rahvas  or eestlased  do that for a subset of...

There is no sensation quite like losing at chess, especially with a draw in sight and failing to escape. That’s what happened to me...

Shamanism was at one time, and still is a thing in Estonia. This tradition of entering an ecstatic trance to enter the spirit world...

Golden light on the hills, sitting on a friend’s deck drinking cold water, tired from trimming and tying grape vines, and listening to...

Small in flow, the Kääpa northeast of Tartu runs thick in legend and inspiration. This gently flowing stream is where the epic hero...

“I drove west from Leningrad towards those troubled Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – whose tragedy has been their tiny size,...