Estonia joined the Euro

Two days ago.

I’ve been to Tallinn (via hovercraft from Helsinki) and then saw whatever one sees on the bus from Tallinn to Riga, Latvia.

If you’ve never been to the Baltic States, they’re likely just a homogeneous mass of small places in your mind. But in fact, each of the three is very different.

1. Estonia. Tallinn is a cute old Hanseatic League city and already appealing to tourists. Plenty of Finns there, of course, and the Estonian language has a sort of Finnish look to it as well. The 1994 TALLINN-STOCKHOLM FERRY DISASTER, with its astonishing 852 deaths (more than half the Titanic toll), is still very much present in the psyche of the city. There’s a simple but moving monument near the harbor. Less present in Tallinn, but still fascinating to me, was the decayed old neighborhood where the opening portions of Tarkovsky’s brilliant Stalker were filmed.

2. Latvia. Of the three Baltic states, Latvia is the one that still looks a bit Soviet, and still has a very large Russian minority. Riga has a lot of potential, and we certainly had a lot of fun there, but it seemed in a bit more need of development than the other two Baltic states. (No offense to any Latvians reading this: Riga is obviously a potential stunner.)

3. Lithuania. Much as with Poland, Catholicism seemed to allow Lithuania to keep a powerful sense of national identity throughout the Cold War. (Mildly ironic, since the Lithuanians were actually the final pagan holdouts in Europe.) Of the three Baltic States, Lithuania feels most like an always-independent culture. Vilnius, the capital, is a beautifully strange place, its entire inner city on the UNESCO World Heritage list. There’s a lot of Jewish history there: the “Jerusalem of the North,” I believe it was called, and the center of the Jewish publishing industry for quite a long time. On a local continental philosophy note, the City Museum of Vilnius has been willed all of the books, papers, and exotic artifacts of Alphonso Lingis, of whose Lithuanian heritage (his parents were farmers, born in Lithuania before ending up near Chicago) they seem to be quite proud.