 Arts and culture |
 The tradition of folklore |
The oldest Estonian religious beliefs reach back to the Stone Age. These included the belief that the spirit of a witch could leave the body and gain the wisdom from the place of the dead (shamanism); and the image of a tribal ancestor-animal (totems). The cosmogony myths about the creation of the world from the egg of a miraculous bird, and the creation of the Milky Way from a giant tree have been preserved in folklore.
Estonian traditional folk culture has developed in contact with German, Nordic and Slavic cultures. Culturally Estonia is more close Scandinavia than to its eastern or southern neighbors, Russia and Latvia.
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Folklore is at the very heart of Estonian culture. Until the 19th century, folklore actually was Estonian culture, because foreign rule from the Middle Ages on had meant that no real literary culture in Estonian had been able to evolve.
Estonians remained peasants for centuries, as the towns became German cultural provinces. A major change took place during the Era of Awakening (1860s-1885), when under the threat of russification German cultural traditions were used as a cultural model.
Estonian national identity is reflected in the colorful traditional dresses, which are still worn in some parts of Estonia and most especially in Estonian songs. Estonia as a tradition of song festivals, which dates back to 1869.
Estonian ceramics, leather, glass, paintings, music and literature or culture as such has a lot to do with the survival of a nation and national identity is spite of hundreds of years of invasions by a variety of more powerful neighbors. |
