Letters from Estonia

It is time to say "Head aega", literally "(wishing you a) good time" to Tallinn. Tomorrow we leave Estonia, having spent...

There is an old joke about USSR Chairman Leonid Brezhnev who was obsessed with having statues made of himself. Apparently a monument was pla...

About two months ago, I began to notice each afternoon after school and on Saturday mornings a cluster of tiny sailboats in the bay. I...

There are those historians who argue that people who lived in the Middle Ages were happier overall than people who lived at any other time i...

There is a famous letter, written by a German cleric, sometime in the 19 th century, complaining to his superiors in Germany about the loos...

“This stork comes into a bar and asks for a beer.” And so on and so on. Jokes like that are funny because of the incongruity of the situatio...

In the 1920s the cloister was a convenient place to get building material. The stones, which had been held together since the early 1400s wi...

It was a “Fourth of July” party on the “Sixteenth of June”. The huge tent was full of people; the food was excellent; and anyone who was any...

“You want to buy this?” he said hopefully. “No, no,” I said. “We’re from Tallinn.” He was trying to get me to buy the run-down building...

Ants Rebane was a peasant who tilled a farm just north of Tartu, in the middle of Estonia. He had three sons, and only one of them, the olde...

Chris Endy, a historian of some note, and coincidentally my step-son, told me of a thesis expressed some time ago by a political scientist w...

Pikk Hermann (Tall Hermann), the tower originally constructed by the Danes during the years 1360 to 1370, is 45 meters high and dominates th...

Time travels both linearly and cyclically. Linear time has caused me to be 69 years old today. But cyclical time has brought me back to the ...

I had joined the Hamilton Citizen’s Band in New Zealand during my 1977 sabbatical. We were rehearsing, and the director looked at me said, ...

It’s the orange color that gets you first. The signs are orange, the shelves are orange, and the sales people are orange. In amongst this o...

When my great grandfather Villem came to Pirita he and his wife Liisu built a small farm house between the Pirita cloister and the river. It...

Every American citizen knows who George Washington was. The father of our country. The capital city was named after him. The Washington Mon...

The history is muddled, but we do know that Villem Vesilind came to Pirita with his three sons – Ado , Otto, and Eduard. The three Vesilind ...

Last year the city of Tallinn celebrated the estimated 600th anniversary of the Brotherhood of St. Maurice, or better known as The Brotherh...