Europe’s last pagan holdouts now run a digital republic
Estonia faces Finland across the Gulf of Finland, Sweden across the Baltic, Latvia south, and Russia east—an advanced Eurozone democracy among the world’s least corrupt states. Settled by 9000 BCE, its medieval natives were among Europe’s last pagans Christianized in thirteenth-century Northern Crusades.
Besides the mainland, the country includes the big islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa and more than 2,300 smaller ones. Tallinn and Tartu are the two main cities, and Estonian, a Finnic language, is the mother tongue of most of its nearly 1.4 million people, making it one of the EU's smallest members by population. It is a parliamentary republic with 79 municipalities and ranks highly for education, press freedom, online public services and tech firms.
The Pulli site on the Pärnu river, from the early ninth millennium BC, is the oldest settlement, at least 11,000 years old. The Mesolithic Kunda culture came first, Narva pottery appears around 5300 BCE, Comb Ceramic culture brought early farming and religious art around 3900 BC, and the Corded Ware people added herding from about 2800 BC. The Bronze Age, from about 1800 BCE, saw the first hill forts, and by the Iron Age around 500 BC people lived on single farms and traded bronze with Scandinavians and Germanic tribes.
Sagas say Estonian raiders killed the Swedish king Ingvar Harra in the early seventh century. Around 1030 Yaroslav the Wise of Kievan Rus' seized Tartu, but the locals destroyed his outpost in 1061. Oeselians from Saaremaa and Curonians raided by sea, and in 1187 raiders sacked the Swedish town of Sigtuna. Tacitus mentioned a people called the Aesti around AD 98, but the Eistland of Norse sagas and runestones is the first use of the name in its modern sense.
The Teutonic Order, Denmark, Poland, Sweden and Russia ruled in turn until a national awakening in the mid-nineteenth century led to independence in 1918. Neutral in 1939, Estonia was invaded repeatedly and annexed by the Soviet Union, while diplomats and a government in exile kept its legal statehood alive until 1991.
Source: Estonia
