Arriving in Estonia

My very educated and intelligent parents didn’t realize that Estonia shared a border with Russia until after I’d already arrived in Tallinn. “You’re safe there, right?” My mom asked me on the phone. “Paps and I just looked at a map.” We call my dad Paps. It's a long story.

I told my friend Evan what my mom said, and he expressed similar concern. “It is kinda ballsy that you’re going over there,” he said.

That’s me, ballsy, heading alone to a former Soviet state with a capital city only about a five-hour drive from St. Petersburg, Russia. I’m closer to Russia than Chapel Hill is to Charlotte.

Of course, putting it like that makes me sound much braver than I actually am. Estonia is completely safe, a NATO member, and low on Putin’s list of potential targets. It’s a flat country of 1.3 million, sandwiched between Russian forest and the Baltic Sea, where the cities offer free Wi-Fi and seven-year-olds walk home from school by themselves. My home for the next two weeks is an apartment in an old Soviet industrial complex, the grey brick buildings now covered with colorful graffiti and filled with cafés, breweries, and vintage clothing stores.

the cat across the street from my apartment

Tallinn’s old town, only a ten-minute walk from my apartment, is all limestone churches, red bricks, and narrow cobblestone alleys. The old town is remarkably well-preserved, despite being bombed by the Russians during World War II and attacked many, many times before that. You can even see two cannonballs embedded in one of the medieval towers from when Ivan the Terrible besieged Tallinn in the sixteenth century.

peep the cannonballs

During Soviet times, the old town was a popular site for filming Russian movies—fairy tales in particular. A weathervane atop one of Tallinn’s many towers is a remnant from the town’s Soviet movie days. And it does feel like a fairy tale town. Walking through the streets, it’s easy to pretend that it’s the 1500s and I’m taking some cheese to the market or whatever. Although, realistically, if I were a twenty-two-year-old living in medieval Tallinn, I’d be illiterate and married with five kids by now. Or, more likely, I’d be dead, since artificial insulin wasn’t discovered until centuries later. Cheerful thoughts!

As I walk around in modern-day Tallinn, people don’t smile at me—they keep to themselves, much like in Norway. So long as I keep a straight face, I blend in pretty well, with my blonde hair and brown jacket. It's a balmy day, but everyone is bundled in hats and puffy winter jackets, distrustful of the sunny weather. Boys play a loud game of tag on the large concrete square in front of a monument to Estonian independence. The monument is a giant stone cross—meant to be a medal of honor, awarded collectively to the Estonian people—flanked by a row of blue, black, and white Estonian flags. Blue to represent the sea and sky, black to represent the soil, and white to represent freedom and liberty.

the monument to Estonia's independence

Tallinn has been a city for over eight centuries, but Estonia has only been an independent country for around fifty years total. It was briefly independent between the two world wars, after which it became a Soviet republic, and has only existed in its current state since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The ethnic Estonian people were historically tribes of farmers and peasants who lived under whichever world power happened to be in control of the Baltics at the time. Estonians first appeared in the historical record during Roman times, in the writings of Tacitus. Christianity reached Estonia only in the twelfth century—very late.

The Danes were the first major empire to control Estonia; in fact, the Danish flag has its origins in Tallinn. The Danish king was losing a battle when the Dannebrog—a white cross on a red background, the modern Danish flag—appeared to him in the sky. The troops rallied and won the battle. Denmark sends an emissary to Tallinn each year to mark the anniversary of this event, and there’s even a special monument in the old town to commemorate where the world’s oldest flag came to be.

allegedly where the Danish flag appeared to the Danish king

I won’t turn this into a lecture on Estonian history, but essentially, Estonia has been controlled by everyone from the Swedes to the Poles to the Germans to (of course) the Russians. German was actually the language of the elites for hundreds of years. Ethnic Estonians haven’t been in control of their land for very long; Tallinn had an ethnic Estonian mayor for the first time in 1907.

About a third of the population today is ethnically Russian, and about half speak Russian at home. My Bolt driver (Bolt is like European Uber) was a young dude who I can only assume was in the Russian mafia. His arms were covered with tattoos, he was missing teeth, and he listened to what sounded like Russian metal for the entire twenty-minute drive. I stayed completely still and silent, just in case. My walking tour guide, Svetlana, was also Russian, but she was much less scary. She was from St. Petersburg and came to Tallinn three years ago when she married an Estonian man.

The other half of the population speaks Estonian, which is closely related to Finnish. Translation: I can’t figure out ANY of it. It looks like no other language I’ve ever seen before. I’ll show you:

Bread in the Nordic and Germanic languages usually looks like bröd/brod/brood, etc., and in the Romance languages it’s pain/pan, etc. Even in Farsi and Urdu and Hindi it’s naan/nun, a word we’re familiar with. In Estonian, it’s leib. I never would have guessed that one.

My apartment has a kitchen, so I went to the grocery store to stock up (and save some money!). I struggled. Google Translate was very much needed to figure out what was yogurt, what was cream cheese, and what was cottage cheese. Estonian cottage cheese is very good though—I bought some from a lady at a market stand. I still don’t know what it’s called. But by the end of my two-week stay in Estonia, I’ll have learned!