At one time those who lived in the area of present-day Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were known as “the werewolf people”, by neighbours and invaders. This had partly to do with pre-Christian legends about a woman who transformed into a she-wolf, a naiselibahunt , a story thought to be of Baltic-Finnic origin. Certain times of the year were known as the werewolf times, in southern Estonia and northern Latvia, and in Livonia of former times. Particularly at the equinoxes, and t

Among Estonian girls’ and women’s names, Liivi holds a special place; it honours a Baltic territory that no longer exists, and a Finnic language  that is all but extinct. So, what is there to celebrate about Livonia? Going back to the early 1200s the three Baltic States we know today were divided between northern Estonia, ruled by Danes, and lands to the south, Liefland and Courland, occupied by land-grabbing, German-speaking, crusading orders, operating with Papal blessing,

In ancient Estonian belief, a shadowy figure in the dark sitting on the roof of a shed, or a tongue of flame flickering into the hearth recalls the firebrand, or tulihänd . The word can also mean a lendtäht , or “flying star”, and the idea extends to sparks in the fire. If a tulihänd got into the home, the head of the family had a tough road ahead, to feed it with good food – on pain of an untimely death, or fiery destruction of the home - and to keep it in meaningless work t

Another’s words can bring old memories to new life. I recently reread John Le Carré’s iconic 1979 spy novel. George Smiley is a British spymaster, and his people are Estonian émigrés whose gathering of secrets eventually forces their Moscow Centre nemesis, Karla, to defect to the West. But not without Soviet reprisals along the way, and Smiley explains the mindset of a former agent to his superiors, and hence the value he places in him: “Vladimir’s father was an Estonian and

No Estonian with a country house and sauna can do without a woodshed full of firewood. Birch splits burn well with bright, welcoming sparks, and are highly prized. Any decent rural block comes with its own stand of birch trees, for sustainable harvesting. Other types of wood are also good; alder is one, and maple and ash would be others. When visiting, our hosts would proudly show us their woodsheds - one we saw was the size of an aircraft hangar - or carefully stacked rows o

In a log cabin  in the forest there lived an Estonian. That is to say the ancestors of a people who spoke an ancient tongue, east of the Ural mountains, and to be precise, in the Ob river catchment in western Siberia. Pine, spruce and birch forests formed their home, amid rivers, bogs  and lakes, within that vast horizontal band across northern Eurasia called the taiga. To the south lies the steppe, grasslands spreading from Mongolia / China to Ukraine in the west, as far as

Spring has arrived, and the swallows and other birds are already angling to nest in the roof of, and under the eaves of the summer cabin....

I have long wondered whether the ancestors of Finns and Estonians invented the log cabin, and CA Weslager provides an answer. In The Log...

“The secret of Chimneys” is the title of a 1925 murder mystery-romance by Agatha Christie, the prolific British crime writer. It involves...

“The incredible Estonians” was one working title for this project; another, “Living at the edge of free Europe”. How have 1.2 million...

Completing the traditional Estonian regalia of a white peasant shirt or blouse tied at the waist in a woollen belt is a brooch to fasten...

The Estonians I spoke to on our cycling trip in 2023 were strangely uninterested in their own mythology. Kalevipoeg is boring and...

Dirhami was our cycling destination from a camping spot west of Tallinn. It sounded to me like Moroccan currency, at any rate, a word in...

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...