Explore Estonia

I looked forward to meeting professor Kalevi Kull on our visit to Estonia in 2023, and ahead of that tried to bone up on his specialist field, “biosemiotics”. This word joins biology with “meanings in signs", and is not easy to understand. On the face of it, living things do stuff either because their brains are so programmed, or because chemical or physical changes make them do it. Shorter days in autumn cause male deer to start rutting, to attract mates and to challenge riv

When we were kids, dad had a thing about the water god of ancient Estonian tradition. In his mind, this was Taara – more of a weather god, actually, a version of Thor – and I carved the word as a name plate for a 10-foot wooden dinghy dad built in the 1970s. The boat still exists and so does its name. In Estonian myth, as elsewhere in northern Europe, the spirits reside in the trees, the water, stones, everywhere. For ancient Estonians, nature is alive, and they saw no disti

In Estonian, the word for sea is meri , which always struck me as like German Meer , Latin mare , or Russian more . I thought the Estonians borrowed the word from other languages, but it could be the other way around. “Based on different historical language sources, the use of the word ‘meri’ has been in the Estonian language for 10,000 years or more,” - Estonian Mythology for the Beginner (2023) by Marju Kõivupuu. Strengthening this idea is the word in related Finnish, also