Estonia took me by surprise, carefully and slowly opening its arms and drawing me in warmly. To learn about a culture, you first ‘dip in’ to the people who carry it: Estonians are deeply in tune with and entwined in their culture.
As a non-Estonian, I first realised how the compact capital city, Tallinn, carries the old, new, and all the green that is in between. But the real magic is outside of the city, and that’s how the Estonians like to keep it. In one of the world’s least religious countries, nature is their church. Long before Christianity arrived, Estonians already had their sacred spaces. Not cathedrals. Groves. Ancient trees, springs, stones: places they didn’t build, but realised nevertheless were holy.
They call it hiis – a sacred grove. At first, it seems as if there is something shamanic about it, though no one speaks of shamanism. No one is channelling spirits from another world, but the belief is that the land itself is alive. “The forest doesn’t need translating; you just need to be silent, listen, and hear what it has to say,” is how my forest guide, Marilin Pehka, explained it. You’re always an hour away from your ‘connection’, by car, public transport, or kayak. And projects like ÖÖD Mirror Houses, in the forested village of Lohusalu, 40 minutes west of Tallinn, make it easy to diverge and create a connection with nature, the Estonian way.
Here, luxury doesn’t shout: it hides. Nearly half of Estonia’s mainland lies under forest, and in Lohusalu the pines don’t stop at some tidy boundary; they march right down to the white sand where the Gulf of Finland begins. That proximity is the whole point of staying here. I step out of my cabin, catch the trees rippling across its mirrored walls like a second forest, pause for the birdsong, and within minutes, my feet are in the sand.
Just when I thought I had grasped the Estonian way of living, I went deep into another layer of spirituality in Kõrvemaa, where it feels like dreaming outside its own borders. While the rest of the country lies flat and unassuming, here the land rises and folds into eskers and hidden valleys, its bogs and mires holding a stillness that feels older than memory. Forest lakes appear without warning, dark and undisturbed, as if the land had kept a few secrets from the rest of the country. It was here that I swam wild in a bog for the first time, in light rain and complete silence. It’s a unique experience for a Londoner like me, but a weekly norm for an Estonian.
Connection to nature carries right through into the Estonian sauna and into vihtlemine, the practice of whisking the body with a viht, a bundle of leafy branches gathered fresh from the forest. Dry brushing itself is far older than any spa trend; long before it became fashionable, it was ritual. Various Native American traditions treated it as a way to tend spiritual well-being, a physical reminder that the body belongs to the earth.
Estonian sauna culture, recognised by UNESCO, isn’t so far from that same instinct. The whisking was never really the point — the sauna itself is. It functions as a third space, somewhere between public and private, where you shed more than clothing. Layer by layer, you arrive at something closer to an honest conversation with whoever is sitting beside you. People come here alone, with family, with friends, even with colleagues, because sitting together in that heat, stripped of pretence, builds a kind of closeness that a boardroom or a bar never quite manages. It isn’t about undressing and sweating in a towel. It’s about shedding the layers you carry everywhere else, and there’s nothing awkward about that at all. It’s natural, and it’s accepted.
There aren’t many places to stay in Kõrvemaa, but I checked into one of the Kuuse Houses, located in the middle of a rich spruce and pine forest near the Sportland Kõrvemaa Hiking and Ski Resort. Quiet luxury follows you here, but keeps you connected with the sacred. The Scandinavian-style architecture seems at one with the forest, not least because large walls of glass let in the light and the view, blurring the line between inside and outside. The only sounds are natural ones—no traffic hum, no planes overhead. There is a sort of stillness which stays with you long after you’ve packed up and gone.
Maybe that’s why secularism never swallowed the spirituality of Estonia: you can’t suppress a religion that was never really a religion, just a way of paying attention.
Estonians don’t go to church; they go outside.
And you can join them.
Kamila
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