Last Weekend we assisted to this fabulous event called “Laulupidu”. A song festival where 18500 people came together from all over the countryin traditional dresses to sing songs about love, nature, unity…. Estonia is a singing country, since it gained its independence through singign, in what was called “the singing revolution”. Since then it has kept its traditions. Everybody wore a traditional dress, which was amysing how many different costumes they could come up with for such a small country !
here are a few facts about it :
- 831 choirs with more than 26 000 singers in all
- 47 orchestras with more than 1600 young orchestrants
- alltogether almost 100 000 people, that counts for apprx 8% of Estonian population.
- Estonians (though it’s a very small country) have the biggest song festival in the world !

For us it was just amaysing to see all of this hapening. How can we have never heared about it before though it is in Europe ! These thousands of children and young people getting together to sing ! about being together, peace, love … I don’t kow that many places in the world which have that. And the worst is that this was supposed to be the “small” one. There is a much larger event, with 30000 people (adults) every 5 years. We were at least lucky we could see it when we were in Estonia.
We’re so grateful Margit and Merle gave us these tickets for my birthday, it probably will be one of the highlights of our stay here.

for those who are interested, here is a video of 2004 and a famous estonian song called “ilus Maa” (beautiful country)…
Comment by Administrator — July 5, 2007 @ 5:27 pm
Tere, I’m an Estonian American and was wondering if you had the words to the song “Ilus Maa”? I’ve been searching and searching and can’t seem to find them.
Comment by Marcus Moore — December 1, 2008 @ 4:30 am
Tere. The words for Ilus Maa can be found here! http://luulekoguja.blogspot.com/2008/09/ilus-maa-rein-rannapilt.html
Enjoy!
Seidi
Comment by Seidi — April 28, 2009 @ 1:14 pm