Estonia

Tallinn preserves one of Europe's best-kept Hanseatic old towns. The University of Tartu, founded in 1632 by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, trained the scholarly elite of the whole Baltic. The Lutheran Reformation produced early literacy there, the ground of the 1988 “singing revolution”.

Conquered by Danish and German crusaders in the thirteenth century, Estonia belonged successively to Denmark, the Teutonic Order, Sweden and then Russia. The Swedish period, remembered collectively as “the good old Swedish times”, saw the opening of the University of Tartu and the first parish schools.

The nineteenth-century national awakening organised itself around the Kalevipoeg epic and the song festivals. Independence in 1918 was won under arms against the Red Army.

Annexed in 1940 by the USSR, Estonia endured deportations and Russification. It regained independence in 1991 after the Singing Revolution. Since then the country has built a fully digital state — electronic identity, online voting, paperless public services — now a model studied across Europe. A member of the Union and NATO in 2004, of the euro in 2011.