New Hampshire Public Radio, Mon June 4, 2012
The boat is shallow draft, some 40-feet long and 18-feet of beam, tar pitched, almost clinker built, wide on the Mother of Rivers, the Emajõgi. For 600 years these boats, with their single square sails, plied the Mother of Rivers from Estonia half way to Moscow with spices, returning with furs.
The last of these boats worked some 70 years ago. A federation of Estonians have gathered lost knowledge and built just one, wide on the river, easing its way, Estonian pastries for the guests, of which I am one. Magic.
Eleven thousand years ago these Finno-Ugric-Altaic peoples came here. Just in time, they say, for a 50-meter drop in the Baltic at the end of the last Ice Age. As it retreated, what may have been an ice-bound Baltic came into free contact with the surrounding region.
Estonian is, in fact, close to Finnish and far from Hungarian. Latvia and Lithuania, the two more southern Baltic states, stretching to Poland, speak Indo-European languages. But they are only distantly related to the Germanic and Latin-rooted languages of much of Europe, or the Slavic languages.
When and where did these Balts come from?
Cotinue reading here:
http://www.nhpr.org/post/eston...
Estonia And The Wisdom Of The Ages
Kultuur
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