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A Cultural Exploration of Estonia

For my first blog post about my internship in Estonia I thought it would be a good idea to start off this series with a brief description that puts the seemingly unknown country and its people in the spotlight for a moment. The second half of this article will be dedicated to time zones in which this information will be also put in a historical context.

Introducing Estonia

Estonia belongs to the three Baltic States and is located in northeastern Europe bordering the Baltic Sea. With an area of 45000km², Estonia is about the same size as Switzerland. It borders Russia to the east and Latvia to the south and is located opposite to Sweden and Finland. The sea-facing country has a 3800km coastline and over 2000 islands.

During the last century its forests have increased in size and cover about 50% of the country's territory today. Generally speaking, forests have always assumed an important role in Estonian culture in which they play a recurring theme in indigenous folklore, but they also serve as a place to rest for many Estonian people especially during national holidays. On that note it is worth pointing out that Estonia has the largest collection of recorded folk songs in the world [1].

The capital Tallinn is home to about 33% of the population, which was estimated to be close to 1.3 million people based on a projection of the latest United Nations Data. This can be attributed to the fact that the country has experienced an almost continuous population decline in the past two decades, although net migration continues to be positive as of 2022. Approximately 23% of the population is of Russian ethnicity [2], a number giving rise to tension in light of recent events.

While geopolitically speaking Estonia is part of the Baltic States, the Estonian language itself is considered to belong to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. As a result, this country also shares a lot of cultural similarities with the Nordic States to which the Estonian people look fondly upon. These people unites a strong sense of independence and love for national sentiments which was crucial to reinstantiates its sovereignty under the umbrella of the Soviet Union following the process of internal disintegration in 1991. More so than many other countries they are proud of their national heritage.

In a series of quick successions, all three of the Baltic States obtained full membership of the European Union and subsequently joined the NATO in 2004 as a mean to further distance themselves from the threat from the east. Estonia was also the first country to propose a joint cyber defense center to NATO in 2004, which ultimately gave rise to the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) in 2008 seated in the capital Tallinn shortly after Estonia itself became a target for a politically motivated cyber attack in 2007 [3]. Just as important is also the Tallinn Manual process that launched in 2009 which is one of the most well known and internationally recognized research accomplishments of the CCDCOE. The Tallinn Manual was later revised in 2017 and has now become an influential resource for legal advisers and policy experts dealing with cyber issues [4].

A Brief Note on Time Zones

If your machine settings are managed by your organization, you may find that you cannot interact with the "Set timezone automatically" switch in the Windows Settings app. This is by design as setting time zones automatically is a system wide setting that applies to all user profiles on a machine [5]. This means that you have to change your time zone manually every time your time zone changes between travels. You can list all available time zones on Windows with PowerShell through the command: 

  Get-TimeZone -ListAvailable

Estonia uses the Eastern European Time (EET) since 26 March 1989. Before the restoration of independence, Moscow Time was imposed on the country. In addition to that, it has observed Daylight Saving Time (DST) since 1981, with the exception of 1989-1996 and 2000-2002 [6]. During summer Estonia switches to Eastern European Summer Time (EEST). However, in some circumstances (e.g. on Microsoft Windows), EET is referred to as FLE Standard Time [7] which also supports DST. This is the reason why you will want to use 

  Set-Timezone -Id "FLE Standard Time"

in order to set the time zone for the duration of your stay in Estonia correctly on Windows. Interestingly enough, DST in Estonia starts on 26 March, which coincides with the adoption of EET. On this occasion it is also a good idea to synchronize your system clock with the Windows time server. Notice that this command requires elevated privileges: 

  w32tm /resync /force

Another interesting fact is that a great number of African countries also uses UTC+02:00 all year long, however their time zone is referred to Central African Time (CAT).

Essential Estonian Phrases

It is considered good etiquette to try to learn some basic expressions if you plan to stay for a prolonged period of time in a foreign country. The table below will cover a lot of situations with surprisingly few words.

English Estonian
hi tere
bye head aega
see you! nägemiseni
please palun
thank you aitäh
thank you very much suur tänu
you are welcome võta heaks
excuse me vabandage
sorry vabandust
yes jah
no ei
maybe võib-olla
it's ok kõik hästi
no problem! pole midagi / pole probleemi
don't worry about it ära muretse
good morning tere hommikust
good afternoon tere päevast
good evening tere õhtust
good night head ööd
have a nice day kena päeva
have a nice weekend mõnusat nädalavahetust
I know ma tean
I don't know me ei tea
I understand ma saan aru
I don't understand ma ei saa aru
I don't speak Estonian ma ei räägi eesti keelt
excuse me, where is the toilet? vabandage, kus asub wc?

Further Reading