Estonia

Where the name comes from

Estonia continues Aesti, a Baltic-region name recorded by Tacitus around AD 98; whether those people were ancestors of today’s Estonians is uncertain.

First people

People settled here about 11,000 years ago, after the ice sheets melted, and Estonian is a Finnic language related to Finnish.¹

Known for

Estonia is known for its digital government: it introduced internet voting in 2005, and in the 2023 parliamentary election more than half of votes were cast online.^2,3

Outside contact

Danish and German crusaders conquered the land in the 1200s, and Sweden later gave northern Estonia to Russia in 1721.⁴

The modern country

Independence in 1918 was interrupted by Soviet annexation in 1940 and German occupation in 1941–1944, before Soviet rule ended in 1991.¹