TALLINN, Estonia (news agencies) — The voices of more than 21,000 choir singers rang out in the rain in Estonia, and a huge crowd of spectators erupted in applause, unfazed by the gloomy weather.
The Song Festival Grounds, a massive outdoor venue in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, was packed on Saturday evening despite the downpour. The traditional Song and Dance Celebration, that decades ago inspired resistance to Soviet control and was later recognized by the U.N.’s cultural agency, attracted tens of thousands of performers and spectators alike, many in national costume.
The four-day choir-singing and dancing event centers around Estonian folk songs and patriotic anthems and is held roughly every five years. The tradition dates back to the 19th century. In the late 1980s, it inspired the defiant Singing Revolution, helping Estonia and other Baltic nations break free from the Soviet occupation.
To this day, it remains a major point of national pride for a country of about 1.3 million.
This year, tickets to the main event -– a seven-hour concert on Sunday featuring choirs of all ages -– sold out weeks in advance.
Rasmus Puur, a conductor at the song festival and assistant to the artistic director, ascribes the spike in popularity to Estonians longing for a sense of unity in the wake of the global turmoil, especially Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“We want to feel as one today more than six years ago (when the celebration was last held), and we want to feel that we are part of Estonia,” Puur told media on Friday.
The tradition to hold massive first song-only, then song and dance festivals dates back to the time when Estonia was part of the Russian Empire.
The first song celebration was held in 1869 in the southern city of Tartu. It heralded a period of national awakening for Estonians, when Estonian-language press, theater and other things emerged, says Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, associate professor at the University of Tartu.
The festivals continued throughout a period of Estonia’s independence between the two world wars and then during the nearly 50 years of Soviet occupation.
The Soviet rulers were into “mass spectacles of all kinds, so in a way it was very logical for the Soviet regime to tap into this tradition and to try to co-opt it,” Seljamaa said in an interview.
Estonians had to sing Soviet propaganda songs in Russian during that time, but they were also able to sing their own songs in their own language, which was both an act of defiance and an act of therapy for them, she said.
At the same time, the complicated logistics of putting together a mass event like that taught Estonians to organize, Seljamaa said, so when the political climate changed in the 1980s, the protest against the Soviet rule naturally came in the form of coming together and singing.
The unity extended beyond Estonia’s borders. During the Singing Revolution, 2 million people in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands to form a 600-kilometer (370-mile) human chain that protested Soviet occupation of the Baltics with a song.
In 2003, the United Nations’ cultural body, UNESCO, recognized Estonia’s folk song festival and similar events in Latvia and Lithuania for showcasing the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.”
