TINA PICOTES VISITS EESTI VABARIIK

Tina Picotes walking across Tallinn streets

Fina Picotes is finishing her tour across the Baltic Republics. Today, she's visiting Eesti Vabariik.

Eesti Vabariik or Republic of Estonia is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia, and to the east by Lake Peipus and Russia. Across the Baltic Sea lies Sweden in the west and Finland in the north. The territory of Estonia consists of a mainland and 2,222 islands and islets in the Baltic Sea, covering 45,339 km2 of land and water, and is influenced by a humid continental climate.

More information: Visit Estonia

The territory of Estonia has been inhabited since at least 6500 BC, with Finno-Ugric speakers , the linguistic ancestors of modern Estonians, arriving no later than around 1800 BC. 

Tina Picotes in Tallinn, Eesti Vabariik

Following centuries of successive German, Danish, Swedish, and Russian rule, Estonians experienced a national awakening that culminated in independence from the Russian Empire towards the end of World War I. During World War II, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, then by Nazi Germany a year later and was again annexed by the Soviets in 1944, after which it was reconstituted as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1988, during the Singing Revolution, the Estonian Supreme Soviet issued the Estonian Sovereignty Declaration in defiance of Soviet rule, and independence was restored on 20 August 1991.

Estonia is a democratic parliamentary republic divided into fifteen counties. Its capital and largest city is Tallinn.

Ethnic Estonians are a Finnic people, sharing close cultural ties with their northern neighbour, Finland, and the official language, Estonian, is a Finno-Ugric language closely related to Finnish and the Sami languages, and distantly to Hungarian.

Citizens of Estonia are provided with universal health care, free education and the longest paid maternity leave in the OECD. Since independence the country has rapidly developed its IT sector, becoming one of the world's most digitally advanced societies.

More information: Lonely Planet

We feel free. We're independent. 

People can be openly proud of being Estonian. 

I have a lot of belief in Estonia. 

Carmen Kass