Estonia. Land of the future. Kprime loves Estonia...some would say, beyond all reason. But she had no way of showing her love. It was clear that this had to change.

(image from wikimedia)

Estonia is a sad land. This is the official Estonia flag:



The blue stands for the sky. The white for "hard work and other abstract values". The black for the land...and for the suffering of the Estonian people. Yes, really. Estonia has been conquered by Swedes. It's been conquered by Danes. It's been conquered by Germans. It's been conquered by Russians. August 20th is not Independence Day--it is Restoration of Independence Day, the day when (in 1991) the Estonians most recently regained the right to self-rule.

But its people endure. They first gained a feeling of national identity during the 19th century, due to a growing middle class, increasing literacy...and the establishment of the Estonian National Song Festival. This is a particularly important touchstone for Estonia, and has continued to this day (with several breaks along the way; you can find its most recent website here). To celebrate, it seemed like we needed an authentic Estonian souvenir from the Song Festival. Hence, this:



Yep. That's an Estonian Song Festival Tamborine. We have decided to name the Estonian Song Festival mascot "Tambo" and refer to him kindly.

However, Estonia is not without its share of controversy. Estonians are usually grouped with the Baltic peoples (Latvian and Lithuanian), because of Estonia's location south of the Baltic Sea. However, they are more closely related to the Nordic peoples, partly due to the intermingling, but also due to the cultural influences after being conquered by the Swedes for so long. Because of this, an alternative flag was actually created and proposed as a replacement for the current flag, to show their Nordic connections and distance themselves from being thought of as just another post-USSR country.



Regarding this, we thought it was important to put ourselves squarely on one side of the issue. The Estonian side. So we made a magnet, for easy posting visibility. In fact, we made a few, so that we could put them in various places, to remind ourselves and inform others.



There's a lot to know about Estonia, actually. For example, the city the song festival is held in, Tartu, is not the capitol of Estonia (that's Tallinn, of course). But there are a great variety of interesting facts about Tartu available to us. Did you know that there are 427 streets in Tartu? To remind us of such important facts, we made a mug (and, being good internet consumers, sent the design to photoworks.com to create):


(The facts are a little bit unclear here; see the expanded images at bottom for a variety of interesting facts about Tartu)
Also, yes--we are a little bit crazy. Thank you for asking.

Once we'd discovered the ability to make a mug, well, it seemed clear that we should have a plate as well. This plate has the Estonian colors ringed around the edge, with a cutout of the Estonian coat of arms at the bottom. (In case you're wondering, seehere.com makes an astonishing array of photo projects).



In all seriousness, Estonia is an impressive land. Since regaining its independence from the USSR is 1991, it has made impressive strides towards becoming a free and modern country--it regularly scores well on the index of economic freedom, and has made some amazing economic progress. It has a great record of computer access (despite being targeted by Russian hackers after taking down a Soviet war memorial statue a couple of years ago), devoting government resources to spreading internet connectivity throughout the country. Internet access is a human right in Estonia--seriously, it was declared by their parliament. It's a great country in many ways. So we needed a way to express that. Answer? T-shirts, of course!


My t-shirt is not that impressive--it's an image of the small Estonian coat of arms on a black t-shirt. It taught us an important lesson about using regular t-shirt iron-on transfers on dark shirts.


Kprime's first shirt, with the full coat of arms ringed by the officially determined Estonian blue, came out much better (we learned the value of dark t-shirt transfers).

But it was really Kprime's second shirt that we were most proud of. This is a map of Estonia, colored in Estonia's national colors, surrounded by the traditional country label oval. It came out really nicely:


So, that's the story of how we created a variety of Estonian souvenirs for Kprime to show her love, and how I came to love Estonia, too. For more pictures (including facts about Tartu!), see below.