Estonia

Estonia barely rises above its own treetops: the highest hill, Suur Munamägi in the south-east, carries a tower so visitors can see over the forest. Raised bogs and pine woods fill the interior, and in Soomaa the spring melt floods the meadows so widely that locals call it the fifth season. Limestone cliffs, the Baltic Klint, face the Gulf of Finland, and on Saaremaa, the largest of over two thousand islands, a meteorite crater at Kaali holds a round pond.

Danish and German crusaders conquered Estonia in the early thirteenth century, and for seven hundred years a Baltic German nobility held the manors. Sweden founded the university at Tartu in 1632; Russia took over in 1721. A national awakening produced the epic Kalevipoeg and a first song festival in 1869. Independence, declared in 1918, was secured by treaty in 1920. Soviet rule from 1940, broken by German control in 1941–44, lasted until Estonia regained independence in August 1991.

Song carries the national memory: every few years a choir of many thousands fills one open-air stage, and in 1988 crowds gathered there night after night to sing forbidden patriotic songs, the start of the Singing Revolution. The composer Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, and rye bread is on the table at nearly every meal. Estonian programmers wrote Skype, and the state runs on X-Road, a data exchange for signing and filing online. Oil shale from Ida-Viru has long fired the power stations near Narva.