Deprived for centuries of freedom and cultural opportunities, repeatedly decimated by war, famine, and pestilence, Estonians have preserved their language and traditions even during the gloomiest periods of their national history.
Presently occupied by the Soviet Union, Estonia is the northernmost Baltic country, bounded on the west by the Baltic Sea, on the north by the Gulf of Finland, on the east by the Soviet Union and Lake Peipsi, and on the south by Latvia. Because of its geography, the country has been invaded throughout its history. Danes, Swedes, Poles, Germans, and Russians have all had designs on Estonia's access to the Gulf of Finland.
The thirteenth century marked the beginning of Estonia's struggle against its conquerors. Under the pretext of Christianization, Swedes, Danes, the German Order of the Knights of the Sword (later the Teutonic Order of Knights), and Russians fought for the land. After three decades of struggle, Estonia was conquered in 1227 and divided up by the Teutonic Order, bishops, and Danes.
An influx of German merchants, artisans, priests, and noblemen followed the conquest. The Teutonic Order ruled for over a century after the Danish crown sold its sovereignty following a major revolt in 1343-1345. The dissolution of the Teutonic Order in the sixteenth century precipitated struggles among Sweden, Poland, and Russia for control of Estonia. The events were resolved in 1629 by the Treaty of Altmark, which gave Estonia to Sweden but left the resident German nobility with privileges in local governments.
Despite the power still held by the Germans, the Swedish regime enacted and enforced liberal reforms. Nobles had to show their land title deeds, land surveys were carried out, and peasant landholdings were registered. When Gustav Adolf II founded the University of Tartu in 1632, he decreed that the sons of Estonian peasants could attend. The first books in the Estonian language were printed during this period. By the end of the era, every parish had a few schools. Estonia's "good old Swedish times" ended with the Great Northern War, 1700-1721, when, by the 1721 Treaty of Nystad, Sweden ceded all its provinces on the eastern Baltic shore to Russia.
Once again the local German nobility retained its privileges. Only at the end of the First World War did Estonia gain independence from Russia: on February 24, 1918, Estonians declared themselves independent and proclaimed their land and government a democratic republic. The Second World War, however, brought Soviet and German invasions and finally in 1944 Soviet occupation, ending with forcible annexation by the Soviet Union (along with Latvia and Lithuania).
The Estonian language is one of the Finno-Ugric languages, which constitute a branch of the Uralic language family. It differs radically from the Indo-European languages. It has no gender, no articles, no future tense, uses suffixes instead of prepositions, and has fifteen cases. Its closest relative is Finnish, and it employs Roman script. The alphabet lacks the letters c, q, w, y, and z, but it contains the letter o~, found in no other language in Eastern Europe.
Peasant life began to improve slowly after the abolition of serfdom in the nineteenth century. Folklore, the only outlet for the
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