Estonian culture: a nation assembled out of collected song

How a national culture was collected and counted

Under Swedish rule, which lasted from 1561 to 1721, Protestant clergy arrived who opposed traditional Estonian belief and practice, and the period brought witch trials and bans on folk music. The songs those bans were aimed at outlasted them. A century and a half later the same repertoire became the material out of which a national culture was deliberately built, and the building is documented down to the page count.

Johann Voldemar Jannsen began publishing the first successful Estonian-language weekly in 1857 and used it to spread eestlane, the word for an Estonian, as a name people applied to themselves. Friedrich Robert Faehlmann collected folk poetry and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald arranged it into Kalevipoeg, the national epic, which appeared in the early 1860s and carries the date 1861 in one account and 1862 in another. It is written in the Kalevala tetrameter, the syllabic metre of Finnic folk poetry, so the printed epic keeps the form of the oral songs it was made from.

Then came the collecting proper. Jakob Hurt launched a nationwide folklore campaign in the 1880s and his volunteers sent in 12,400 pages. Matthias Johann Eisen, working on the same principle, had amassed about 90,000 pages by the early twentieth century. Both bodies of material are held by the Estonian Folklore Archives. When the national movement split in 1878, Hurt led the wing that concentrated on culture and Estonian-language schooling while Carl Robert Jakobson led the wing pressing for political and economic rights, which put the country's principal folklore collector at the head of one of its two national factions.

The oldest layer in the collections is regilaul, runic song, in a metre shared with the other Baltic Finnic peoples. One such song has a bird laying three eggs, from which the Sun, the Moon and the Earth emerge. Its heroes are giants, Kalevipoeg and Suur Tõll, and boulders and hollows across the country are explained as marks Kalevipoeg left.

What the song celebration still does

Choirs and musical societies were institutionalised in Estonia during the eighteenth century, and choral singing spread through the countryside and the towns as singing societies and song festivals grew popular in western Europe. The first nationwide song festival was held at Tartu in 1869, four years after the founding of the Vanemuine musical society. The celebration has been held every fifth year since, at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds, and it draws up to 100,000 participants. Its joint choir has exceeded 30,000 singers in front of an audience of 80,000. The dance festival runs on its own four-year cycle.

UNESCO inscribed the Baltic song and dance celebrations on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, having proclaimed the element in 2003, as one listing covering Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Across the three countries the events assemble as many as 40,000 singers and dancers, most of them amateur choirs and dance groups who rehearse through the year in community centres under professional conductors and instructors. Estonia and Latvia hold theirs every fifth year and Lithuania every fourth. The repertoires run from the oldest folk songs to contemporary compositions, and the threat named in the nomination is rural depopulation breaking up the local amateur groups the whole arrangement rests on.

The political history of the event is written into it. After the Baltic states left the Russian Empire at the end of the First World War the celebrations became a means of asserting national identity, and purpose-built festival grounds were constructed for them. After the annexation of 1940 they were adapted to the prevailing communist ideology. The independence movement of 1987 to 1990 took its name from what people did at them, and Estonia: history follows that sequence through to the restoration of independence in August 1991.

Modern music sits on the same base without leaning on it. The composer Arvo Pärt writes in a minimalist idiom and is performed internationally, and Estonia won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2001 with "Everybody", sung by Tanel Padar and Dave Benton.

Which language the singing is in

Estonian belongs to the Finnic family and its close relative is Finnish, so Estonians are not Balts in the linguistic sense: the language has no near relation in Latvia or Lithuania, and its nearest kin lies across the gulf in Finland. A large number of words are spelled identically in the two languages and mean different things, and a stock of jokes on both sides runs on that. Finns tend to have difficulty pronouncing the Estonian letter õ, and an Estonian speaking Finnish is given away by the accent.

Estonian is spoken by 84% of the population, 67% of them as a mother tongue and 17% as a foreign language, and the record carries no measurement date for that split. The census of 2021 found 76% of the population able to speak a foreign language, and 17% of native speakers of standard Estonian able to speak a dialect as well. The South Estonian dialects, Mulgi, Tartu, Võro and Seto, are spoken by nearly 100,000 people and are generally treated as regional forms of Estonian.

The written record of the language starts early and stays thin for a long time. The oldest records date from the thirteenth century, the Wanradt-Koell catechism appeared in 1535 and the first Estonian primer in 1575. Bengt Gottfried Forselius, who lived from about 1660 to 1688, wrote the first Estonian ABC book and devised a spelling system that made the language easier to teach, and public education in Estonian began in the 1680s on the strength of it. The first periodical in Estonian ran from 1766 to 1767 and the first newspaper appeared in 1806. University courses were first taught in Estonian in 1919. Estonian Sign Language was recognised under the Language Act in 2007 and has about 4,500 users. Public schools began moving to Estonian-only instruction in 2024.

Why Estonians stopped declaring a religion

The census of 2021 recorded 29% of the population identifying with a religion and 58% reporting no religious affiliation. Of those who named one, 93% described themselves as Christian, down from 97% at the census of 2011. A Pew Research study in 2015 divided the 45% of its respondents who declared no affiliation into 9% atheists, 1% agnostics and 35% believing in nothing in particular.

Those figures are the end of a long slide. Around 80% of the population was Protestant before the Second World War, the great majority of them Lutheran, with Eastern Orthodoxy and the Baptists behind. Christianity had arrived late and by force: the indigenous population was Christianised during the Northern Crusades of the thirteenth century, a chronicle of 1229 names Tharapita as the supreme deity of the islanders of Saaremaa, and sacred groves of oak were where worship happened. The Reformation reached the towns in the 1520s, most landowners and the rural population had adopted Lutheranism by the 1530s, and regular services began to be held in Estonian in that decade.

Membership now runs the other way round. The Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church is recorded at 160,000 members, about 11.8% of the population, and no measurement date is attached to the figure; Eastern Orthodoxy has exceeded Lutheran membership since the census of 2011. The agreement that gave the Lutheran church a preferential position ended in 2023. Two Orthodox jurisdictions operate in the country, and a community of Russian Orthodox Old Believers has lived on the shore of Lake Peipus since the seventeenth century. The Seto of the south-east are Orthodox. The constitution guarantees freedom of religion, separates church from state and makes belief a private matter. Storytelling with pre-Christian material in it has survived best in southern Estonia.

What the listed traditions have in common

Four elements from Estonia stand on the UNESCO Representative List, and none of them is a doctrine, a building or an object. Each is something a group of people does in company and teaches by doing.

The Kihnu cultural space covers two small islands off the Baltic coast, home at the time of inscription in 2008 to a community of 600 people. The men went to sea to hunt seals and to fish while the women stayed to farm and keep the household, and the women accordingly became the custodians of the songs, games, dances, wedding ceremonies and handicrafts. Singing accompanies collective handicraft work and religious celebration. The repertoire includes runic Kalevala-metre song of pre-Christian origin. The most visible part of it is woollen: mittens, stockings, skirts and blouses woven and knitted at home on traditional looms from local wool, in bright colours, bold stripes and dense embroidery whose forms come out of old stories. The nomination names economic hardship, uncontrolled housing development and insensitive tourism as the pressures on it.

Seto leelo, inscribed in 2009, belongs to the Seto of south-eastern Estonia and the Pechory district of Russia. A lead singer delivers a verse line, the choir joins for its closing syllables and then repeats the whole line. Words are sometimes learned from earlier singers, and skill at composing new ones is what marks out a lead. Most choirs are made up entirely of women, and the finest lead singer is crowned Mother of Song on Seto Kingdom Day. The choirs work as the hubs of their community.

The smoke sauna tradition of Võromaa, inscribed in 2014, covers a good deal more than bathing: making the whisks, building and repairing the sauna and smoking meat in it all belong to the practice. The room has no chimney and the smoke from the burning wood circulates inside it. Bathers sweat, beat themselves with whisks to scrub off dead skin, cool outside, rinse and go back in. It runs on Saturdays and before major festivals and family events, families take turns hosting each other, and an older member of the household prepares the sauna with children alongside who acquire the skills by watching. In the traditional farmyard the sauna is a separate building, standing beside a single farm in open ground.

What Estonians read and what they keep

A study in 2018 recorded Estonian households owning an average of 218 books, with 35% of them owning 350 or more.

The literature on those shelves begins in the nineteenth century. Kristjan Jaak Peterson was the first Estonian poet of note, Lydia Koidula the central figure of the national romantic verse that followed, and the neo-romantic Young Estonia group around Gustav Suits took its programme from Finnish, French, German, Scandinavian and Italian writing of about 1905. A. H. Tammsaare's five-volume Truth and Justice tracks a poor farming society turning into an independent state. Between 1944 and 1990 writers who had left the country published 267 novels, 181 poetry collections and 155 memoirs in exile. Jaan Kross, who stayed, wrote historical fiction whose allegories carried what could not be said directly, and became the most translated Estonian writer of the occupation years. Andrus Kivirähk works the folklore and mythology into the absurd and the grotesque.

Estonia held 170 museums as of 2023, with more than 10 million artefacts between them. The Art Museum of Estonia was founded on 17 November 1919 and took its first permanent home in Kadriorg Palace in 1921. The palace now shows foreign art and the main Estonian collection sits in the purpose-built Kumu.

Which theatre came first

August von Kotzebue founded an amateur company in Tallinn in 1784 that played comedies for the Baltic German nobility, and a professional company with its own building followed in 1809, performing mostly in German with some Estonian and Russian. Estonian-language theatre proper dates from the Vanemuine society's staging of Koidula's The Cousin from Saaremaa in 1870. Vanemuine in Tartu and the Estonia Theatre in Tallinn both turned professional in 1906, and the Estonia Theatre building, raised as a national effort by Estonian society, opened on 24 August 1913. The country had 20 theatres in 2004, and in 2009, 46% of the urban population and 40% of the rural population went to one.

What Estonian cinema kept adapting

Film production started with a newsreel of a royal visit to Tallinn in 1908. Johannes Pääsuke made the first Estonian documentary in 1912 and the short Karujaht Pärnumaal in 1914, and the first full-length feature followed in 1924. Estonian cinema has drawn heavily on the country's own literature, with Truth and Justice, November and Names in Marble all adapted from books, and Tangerines took nominations for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe in 2013. In animation, Priit Pärn's Breakfast on the Grass of 1987 read as a critique of totalitarian society, and his Night of the Carrots won the Grand Prize at Ottawa in 1998.

What Estonians put on rye bread

Dense black rye bread comes with almost every meal, as the base of an open sandwich or beside a soup. The best known version is kiluvõileib, sprats on rye. Baltic herring, räim, and sprat, kilu, are served spiced as appetisers or on bread, and fish generally holds a large place in the diet.

The rest of the table was built on what the farm and the sea gave. Hunting and fishing are now practised mostly as hobbies, though locally caught fish and locally raised meat stay central. The staples are rye bread, pork, potatoes and dairy, with milk and sour cream used throughout. Spring and summer cooking leans on fresh berries, herbs and vegetables, winter on what was preserved: jams, pickled cucumbers, mushrooms. Blood sausage, verivorst, and sauerkraut, hapukapsas, are named by Estonians themselves as typically Estonian, and both are eaten mostly at Christmas. Locally brewed beer is the usual drink with a meal, alongside fruit wines made from apples and berries, and viin, vodka.

When the bonfires are lit

Estonia observes 11 public holidays with a mandatory day off and 12 further national holidays. Independence Day falls on 24 February and marks the declaration of 1918. Võidupüha, on 23 June, marks the victory in the War of Independence of 1918 to 1920 and runs straight into Jaanipäev, midsummer, on 24 June.

Jaanipäev is where the pre-Christian calendar is still plainly visible. People leave the towns for the countryside and large bonfires are lit. Towards morning, when the fire has burned down and only the ashes are glowing, potatoes are buried in the embers, dug out a few hours later, peeled and eaten hot. The night carries its own pairing magic: a set of different flowers gathered and placed under a pillow is meant to show a future spouse in a dream, and there is the search for the beetle called jaaniuss.

Christmas, jõulud, runs from 23 December through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, with schools and many workplaces closed until New Year, and it is the most extensive and most commercialised holiday of the year. The trees, the advent calendars and the dishes cooked only in that week follow northern and central European practice, with the blood sausage and sauerkraut of the older Estonian table on the same plate.

Underneath the calendar sits the summer place. Estonia is now largely urban, with 70.7% of the population living in urban areas as of 2025, and the habit of spending holidays at a cottage in the countryside has come through the move intact.