I just returned from an Estonian's birthday party out in the countryside. Her father and his long-term girlfriend hosted nearly twenty of us at their farm 30 kilometers west of Tartu, near Võrtsjärve, the big lake shaped like a hand axe cutting Tartu off from bohemian Viljandi, and aimed straight at the border towns of Valga and Valka, straddling the Estonian/Latvian border. We ate šašlõkk (Georgian shish-kebab, and the tenderest, juiciest meat I know of), slapped each other with birch branches (leaves still attached) in the sauna, and around 3 AM, the last four of us somehow fit into a sleeper sofa (feet facing away from the door, because, in Estonia, as in Ukraine, "only the dead leave the room feet first).
Oh, but I digress. I mentioned to the birthday girl, J., that two friends of mine (P. and R.) had just returned from Australia. As we talked, she realized that she knew these people as well, as she had once moved into a flat that they had inhabited. J. had herself just coincidentally moved into a flat inhabited by three friends of mine who had also lived with P., meaning that her last two flats in Estonia had both been full of people who had lived with P., in a city full of students and student housing. When I mentioned this, I was told, as I frequently am, that "Estonia is a small country."
This may be a stretch, and only interesting to myself, but it illustrates one of Estonia's most endearing (and occasionally alienating) qualities: with a population of 1.3 million (70% of whom are ethnically Estonian), everyone knows each other.
Perhaps I should have chosen better examples. Like when I interviewed a man for my thesis, and got picked up while hitchhiking a few minutes later by one of his coworkers, or all the other times I've stumbled across friends or friends of friends while travelling to remote parts of the country. Or how village gossip extends to the country's elite (affairs can't be kept secret for long, and one villager claimed that his village's most famous resident, the country's most divisive politician, is likely a true bastard, conceived when his supposed father was far away). One last example of Estonia's nation-wide rumor mill: in a private email to other parents planning Christmas events at her children's school, the first lady, Evelin Ilves, suggested that parents not give their children chocolates from the main national chocolate company, Kalev (most countries around here, from Finland to Lithuania, have a flagship chocolate company) because of their high levels of trans-fats. Naturally, this email spread from email inbox to outbox, became a national issue, caused an embarrassed Kalev to lose sales, and ultimately change its recipes. Or, as Mrs. Ilves wrote in one of those backwards apologies politicians are so fond of, "I am sorry if my reference to the ingredients of some products of Kalev that in the initial private letter simply expressed my own and my family's consumer preferences has been turned into a call for a boycott against the products of your enterprise as a result of misinterpretation of information." (http://www.eesti.ca/media-misinterpretation-of-information/article25481).
Oh, sure, Littlewood's Law implies that astounding coincidences are bound to occur from time to time, such as when I met, on my first night in Germany, a good friend of a friend from college, or when I met an alum from my hometown who has gone on to have a career as an Estonian-language comedian, who claimed that he had once been an intern with my hometown's parliament, and witnessed my state's current governor (and Republic front-runner) having an affair with another intern. But these are regular events. Tartu is a small town, and its students are mostly concentrated in the center of the city, creating an effect somewhat akin to when I studied at a liberal-arts college with 1,250 students, and couldn't get to the library without running into friends, or leave dinner without spending two hours going from table to table, but this effect continues throughout the country. When I meet random Estonians by happenstance, they almost inevitably share Facebook friends with me.
Estonia is also a black hole, sucking in ex-pats, and never letting them leave, so there are a fair number of ex-pats who have come here for life, but Tartu is hardly Tübingen, and Tallinn no Berlin, so foreigners are still sufficiently rare that they stick together. Most Erasmus students don't mix with this crowd much, flitting around the bars of Rüütli like mayflies trying to fit their entire lives into a semester or two (and crashing into walls about as often), but whether they followed a wife or girlfriend to Tartumaa, arrived with the European Volunteer Service and never left, or are seeking their third degree in the country, the ex-pats know each other well, like a neighborhood within a village.
Oh, but there is another way in which the country of Estonia makes me think back to the Boazes, Akans, and Soldiers Groves of Wisconsin. While Estonians continue to move to the cities, which exploded during the Soviet era's mass industrialization and immigration (the notable exception being the Russophonic cities of the northeast, which imploded at independence), they still maintain a grip on the last 5,000 years spent farming the land around the cities. On Midsummer, the longest and biggest night of the year, the cities empty out, as people travel to their ancestral farms to sing, drink, and feed bonfires. There are no Manhattan children assuming milk is made in a factory here, as even a teen raised in the very center of Tallinn is barely an hour's walk from the countryside.
But, wait, perhaps I buried the lede. What's the hallmark of a small town in the US, and hopefully elsewhere? The parade! Back home, I stopped enjoying these years ago, but in Estonia, I've begun to seek them out. I find these parades sweet, sincere, and bursting in pride and cheery optimism--we're on our way to something good! The examples that pop into my mind first preceded song festivals, a German tradition that has become the foremost symbol of Estonian culture (Estonia's succession from the USSR was popularly labelled the "Singing Revolution.") Almost exactly a year ago, I attended the main song festival, which is held every five years in Tallinn. In 1988, 300,000 (about 1/3 of all ethnic Estonians) attended. Last year, 33,000 sang for 70,000 people at the first concert alone. This concert was preceded by a parade (pictured above and below) which included 10,000 taking part in a simultaneous national dance festival. As it turns out (these are the last statistics, I promise!), it takes five hours for 42,000 people to march, sing, and dance past oneself. Although the parade began with fog, the sun soon burnt through it, burning half of my face red, and leaving the other half pale, making my face resemble the flag of Bahrain (or maybe of Poland, on its side).
And yet, five hours in, people were still singing with gusto, throwing their dance partners in the air, and running up to friends and family in the crowd. Although there were more than a thousand foreign singers, and a few misplaced Hare Krishnas (halfway through the parade, they left, sat down behind me, and started chanting), most people wore colorful folk costumes, held streamers, stuffed animals, instruments, and symbols of their villages. Some sang patriotic anthems, but the Estonian translation of "If You're Happy and You Know It" was the parade's breakaway hit. People also broke away from their choruses, hugging friends and family, exchanging Estonian flags and cornflowers (another national symbol), while one boy with impressive stamina and hot pink clothes exhorted the marchers by shouting "Long live!" and then their town name. For hours.
The parade was somewhat self-consciously cheesy at times, and yet, the sense of pride was true and palpable. After centuries of being denied their language, their songs, people were singing the songs they chose. I've seen this pride in flowers, town names, local symbols in parades from Altenberg Germany's city festival (with its knights and skat players) to Stoughton, Wisconsin's celebration of Syttende Mai (the day Norway's constitution was signed), with its tractor-pulled longships sailed by horned Vikings. But I've never felt it so unabashedly and sincerely as here. There were no teenagers mocking faded paint here, and while the celebration was national, it retained a decidedly local character, as flashy Pärnu marched past with professionally-made signs, and children towing elephant toys on rollers, the students at the Life Sciences University wore undyed linens, the fraternies marched by with sabres in hand, the Setu waved their own national flag, singers from Ida-Viru County advanced with flails and mandolins...
I saw the same repeated on a smaller scale exactly a week ago. As I left a festival devoted to Tartu's Emajõgi (Mother-river), I followed the sound of a marching band to a parade held for the annual religious song festival. I saw the same costumes, similar signs, and the same happy-go-lucky cheer as thousands of singers descended from Cathedral Hill and marched on the city's song festival grounds (every town has one). Every few hundred meters, a brass band played a march, as people sang in Estonian, Latin, German, English, and Finnish. As the parade passed a wedding party, people cheered and sang wedding songs until drowned out by church bells. I stumbled across one of my thesis supervisors, who half-jokingly pointed out how many people in the parade were Finns (Estonia being so famously areligious), but the effect was the same. I followed the parade East, listened to people welcome the foreigners in their own languages, and reveled in the innocent joy in the crowd.
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