Statue of "mulks" in Tarvastu, Southern Estonia. Photo by: Kris Süld / Visit Viljandi
Fifty thousand Estonians came together in May 2008 – that’s 4% of the population (it would be about 15.4 million Americans) – to clean. Over ten tonnes of rubbish was picked up from forests and roadsides, work that would normally take many years and millions of euros, got done in a few hours. The Teeme ära (Let’s Do It) collective cleaning initiative started to grow every year and spread outside Estonia to Latvia, India, Slovenia, Ukraine, and many other countries. In 2018, the first World Cleanup Day ‘Let’s Do It World’ took place with 18 million people participating.
This is not the end of contradictions for Estonians. Why did people who supposedly do not like interactions invent an app that facilitates free video calls with people from all around the world? In the past, Estonians could escape modern life and the city bustle (even though the largest city in Estonia has a population of only around 400,000) by going to their country houses deep in the woods or visiting their grandparents. Now, even the farthest peripheries of the earth cannot shelter them from human interaction. Skype, created by Estonian programmers, was first published on 29 August 2003. It quickly became synonymous with internet calls, and ‘to Skype’ became a verb in many languages.
View of the Viljandi lake. Photo by: Siim Verner Teder / Visit Viljandi
Bogshoeing at the Loosalo bog in Northern Estonia. Photo by: Patrik Tamm / Visit Estonia
The Baltic Chain of 1989 is probably
the best known mass protest of the
independence restoration era in the Baltic
states. Over a million people from the three
Baltic states formed a 700 km human chain
by standing next to one another, holding
hands, to express mutual longing for
freedom for Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
A true individualist would have come up
with something a little less crowded…
There is a joke about Estonians: In front of
the elephant cage at the zoo, an American
thinks, ‘If I sold the animal, I’d get a lot of
money’. A person from Japan thinks, ‘How
is this animal built?’ An Estonian thinks,
‘What does the elephant think of me?’
On the one hand, concern regarding your
image makes you try harder and be better.
On the other hand, maybe Estonians are
not quite the loners and individualists they
let on to be.
It is safer to do big things
together, and cooperation is nothing to
be ashamed of. So, if you see a lonely
Estonian, do not think they want to be
alone – maybe they just haven’t found
anyone with whom to do something.