Estonia

Estonia is a country of 1.37 million people — fewer than live in Prague — spread across 45,339 km² that are more than half forest and dotted with 2,222 islands. It has the best-preserved medieval merchant town in northern Europe, a national park you can walk into from the capital, raised bogs you cross on boardwalks, and a sauna culture that is genuinely part of daily life rather than a spa product.

It is also the country that decided, in the late 1990s, to build its entire state on the internet. Ninety-nine per cent of public services are online, you sign a mortgage with a card reader, and the only three things Estonians say they still have to do in person are marry, divorce and buy property. This is not a marketing slogan; it is what daily life is actually like, and it is a genuinely interesting thing to observe from the inside.

For a traveller the practical appeal is that Estonia is small, cheap by Nordic standards, safe, in the EU and the eurozone, and startlingly easy. Tallinn to Tartu is two hours by train. Tallinn to the Lahemaa forests is an hour by car. Tallinn to Helsinki is two hours by ferry. You can see a great deal of a whole country in a week without ever feeling rushed.

What Estonia is not is dramatic. The highest point is 318 m. There are no mountains, no gorges and no big cities. What there is instead is a very particular northern quiet — pine forest, grey Baltic, bog, empty coastline, low light — and if that is a thing you like, it is one of the best places in Europe to find it.

Estonians call their country Eesti and themselves eestlased. The name most likely descends from Aesti, a people Tacitus placed on the Baltic coast in the first century — though whether he meant these Estonians or their Baltic neighbours is still argued. Estonians only began calling themselves eestlased in the nineteenth century; before that the ordinary self-description was maarahvas, "country people".

Flat, wooded, wet and coastal. Estonia is a low limestone plain on the edge of the Baltic Shield, with an average elevation of about 50 m, a 3,794 km coastline once every inlet and island is counted, and more than 2,200 islands of which about twenty are inhabited.

Everything is close. Tallinn sits on the north coast; Tartu is 185 km south-east; Pärnu is 130 km south on the west coast; the Saaremaa ferry leaves from Virtsu, about two hours from Tallinn. You can drive the length of the country in four hours.

Estonians have been in Estonia for a very long time — the Kunda culture goes back around 11,000 years — and were among the last pagans in Europe. That ended with the Livonian Crusade of 1208–1227, when German and Danish crusaders conquered the territory. Tallinn's Estonian name comes from Taani linn, "Danish town", and the Danish flag is supposed to have fallen from the sky over the battle there in 1219.

For the next seven hundred years Estonians were peasants and someone else owned the land. The Baltic German nobility and the Hanseatic League ran Tallinn and Tartu as rich merchant cities trading Russian furs, wax and grain to the west; the countryside was serfdom. Sovereignty passed from Denmark to the Teutonic Order to Sweden (1561–1710, still remembered as "the good old Swedish time") to the Russian Empire after the Great Northern War.

The national awakening came in the second half of the nineteenth century: the language was standardised, the epic Kalevipoeg was assembled, newspapers appeared, and — decisively — the first national song festival was held at Tartu in 1869. Serfdom had been abolished in 1816–19, earlier than in Russia proper, and by 1900 Estonian peasants had begun buying the farms they worked.

Independence was declared on 24 February 1918 in the gap between the collapse of the Russian Empire and the arrival of German troops, and then had to be fought for: the War of Independence ran to 1920, when Soviet Russia recognised Estonia "for all time" at Tartu. The republic lasted twenty-two years, redistributed the Baltic German estates to Estonian farmers, and ended with a pact signed in Moscow.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 assigned Estonia to the Soviet sphere. Occupation followed in June 1940, then German occupation from 1941, then Soviet reoccupation in 1944 that lasted forty-seven years. Estonia lost something like a fifth of its population to deportation, execution, war and flight.

Between 1987 and 1991 Estonia sang its way out of the Soviet Union, and the phrase is not decoration. In the summer of 1988, over successive nights, spontaneous crowds gathered at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds to sing national songs that had been effectively banned for forty years. On one night there were an estimated 300,000 people — more than a quarter of the Estonian nation, in one field.

Estonia rebuilt its state on the internet because in 1991 it had almost nothing to preserve — no legacy systems, no money and a bureaucracy that had to be created from scratch. Ninety-nine per cent of public services are now online, available 24 hours a day, and the digital signature has had full legal force since 2002.

Since 2014 Estonia has issued e-Residency — a government-issued digital identity for non-residents, which lets anyone in the world run an EU company online from anywhere. Over 100,000 people from more than 170 countries have one, and they have founded tens of thousands of Estonian companies.

A city of 460,000 on the Gulf of Finland, with a medieval core so intact that it is used as a stand-in for any northern European city a film needs. The Old Town has been on the UNESCO list since 1997, and unlike most such places it is still lived in and worked in rather than purely a stage set.

The mistake most visitors make is spending two days in the Old Town and leaving. The more interesting Tallinn is in the districts around it — an imperial park, a wooden-house neighbourhood, and a former factory quarter that is now the centre of the city's creative economy.

Tartu is Estonia's second city, its university town since 1632, and — Estonians will tell you — where the country actually thinks. It held the European Capital of Culture title in 2024. It is smaller, cheaper and considerably less touristed than Tallinn, and a good many people prefer it.

An hour east of Tallinn, Lahemaa was the first national park in the Soviet Union, designated in 1971 — a startling thing to get past Moscow, and it happened partly because the coast was a closed border zone anyway. It covers 747 km² of pine forest, bog, erratic boulders and four peninsulas of very quiet coastline.

Soomaa — "land of bogs" — is 390 km² of raised bog, floodplain meadow and river in the south-west, and it is best known for something that happens to it every spring. When the snow melts, the rivers cannot drain and the whole park floods to a depth of several metres. Estonians call it the fifth season.

The two big western islands are a slower, older Estonia — juniper heath, windmills, limestone cliffs, thatched roofs and a dialect that mainlanders find funny. Saaremaa is the largest island at 2,673 km²; Hiiumaa to its north is a third of that and considerably emptier.

Beyond the big two are a couple of thousand smaller islands, about twenty of them inhabited, several with a distinct culture that survived precisely because getting there was difficult.

For its size Estonia has extraordinary large-mammal density — roughly 900 brown bears, several hundred wolves and lynx, and elk everywhere. Half the country is forest, the human population is thin, and much of the interior is empty in a way little of Europe still is.

Sauna in Estonia is not wellness, it is hygiene, sociability and something close to ritual. The smoke sauna tradition of Võromaa in the south-east is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list, and a proper one is a very different experience from the electric box in a hotel basement.

Estonians have a reputation, which they cultivate, for being reserved to the point of comedy. It is broadly true and it is not unfriendliness: small talk is regarded as noise, silence in company is comfortable, and a straight answer is a courtesy. Once that is understood, Estonians are among the easiest people in Europe to deal with.

Estonian is Finno-Ugric, related to Finnish and distantly to Hungarian, and unrelated to Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, German or anything else nearby. It has fourteen grammatical cases, no future tense, no grammatical gender, and three degrees of phonemic length — short, long and overlong — which is what makes it hard.

The traditional cuisine is northern peasant food — rye, pork, potato, dairy, herring and whatever the forest gave — and it is honest rather than refined. The modern one is something else entirely: Tallinn and the islands now hold some of the most interesting new-Nordic cooking anywhere, built on the same short list of ingredients.

What to eat

Beer, and increasingly good beer. Estonia has a serious craft scene for a country of 1.4 million, a national liqueur that tastes of medieval pharmacy, and a rapidly growing production of ciders and sparkling apple wines that suit the climate far better than grapes ever will.

The Estonian year is organised around light. Midsummer is the biggest date by a distance, the song festival is the biggest event, and the long dark from November to February is survived with candles, sauna and a great deal of indoor culture.

Estonia punches enormously above its weight in a narrow set of sports — anything involving endurance, throwing, or precision. Per head of population it is one of the most successful Olympic nations in history.

Cool, damp, maritime and defined by how much light there is. Tallinn gets about 19 hours of daylight in June and about six in December, and that difference matters far more to the experience of the country than the temperature does.

Tallinn Airport (TLL) is small, 4 km from the centre, connected by a tram in about fifteen minutes, and has repeatedly been voted the most pleasant airport in Europe — it has a library, a cinema and actual armchairs. Getting to Estonia is easy from anywhere in Europe.

Estonia is genuinely easy from Prague — EU, Schengen, eurozone, no visa, no border check, no currency to change and no roaming charges. Flying time is under two and a half hours direct.

One of the easiest countries in Europe to travel in. English is widespread, everything takes cards, the trains and buses run on time and are cheap, and the whole country fits comfortably into a week.

Cheaper than the Nordics, more expensive than it was. Estonia is now roughly on a level with the Czech Republic for restaurants and groceries and a little above it for accommodation, having caught up fast over the last decade.

Estonia is a very safe country by any measure — low violent crime, competent police, EU-standard healthcare and no natural hazards worth the name. The genuine risks here are ticks, ice and, in a different register, the neighbour.

Estonia consistently ranks among the top handful of countries in the world for press freedom and internet freedom — usually inside the global top ten on the RSF index and repeatedly first on Freedom House's internet freedom rankings. This is one of the more genuinely remarkable things about a country that was a closed Soviet republic within living memory.

Estonia is the country I recommend most often to people who say they want to go somewhere in Europe they have not been. It is cheap enough, close enough, easy enough and small enough that a week gets you the whole thing, and it is different enough from central Europe to be genuinely worth the trip rather than a variation on it.

The specific thing to do here is get out of Tallinn. The Old Town is beautiful and it takes a day, maybe two. What stays with you is the Viru bog at seven in the morning with mist on the pools, a smoke sauna in Võrumaa followed by a lake, a ferry to Hiiumaa in flat grey weather, an empty beach on the west coast with pine behind it. The country's real subject is quiet, and you cannot get quiet from a cobbled square in July.

Go in September if you can. The light is low and gold, the forest is full of mushrooms, the cranes are moving through Matsalu, everything costs less and there is nobody there. Second choice is late May. Midsummer is wonderful if you have Estonian friends and slightly pointless if you do not, because the whole country vanishes into private gardens.

And spend an evening thinking about what they built. A country of 1.3 million people, occupied for fifty years, that came out of it in 1991 with nothing, decided to put the entire state online, and now has a functioning digital democracy and more tech companies per head than anywhere in Europe. It is a small place that made a very large decision and stuck to it. That is worth a look on its own.

— Radim Kaufmann