Portal:Estonia/Featured article/2007 archive
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This is an archive of article summaries that have appeared in the Selected article section of Portal:Estonia in 2007. For past archives, see the complete archive page.
Estonia was a dominion of Denmark during Middle Ages. Between 1206 and 1645 Denmark for several periods of time either held claims to, or ruled over, parts of present-day Estonia.
Denmark rose as a great military and merchant power in the 12th century. It had an interest to end the occasional Estonian and Couronian pirate attacks that threatened its Baltic trade. Danish fleets made attacks against Estonia in 1170, 1194, and 1197. In 1206 King Valdemar II and archbishop Andreas Sunonis made a raid to Ösel (Saaremaa) island. The islanders were forced to submit and the Danes built a fortress there, but they found no volunteers to man it. They burned it down themselves and left the island. However, they laid a claim to Estonia as their possession, which was recognized by the pope.
In 1219 Valdemar gathered a fleet of hundreds of ships against the Estonians, led by the archbishop, bishops and the army of Rugians under their prince Wizlav. They landed in Lyndanisse (Tallinn) harbor in the province of Revelia (Revala, Rävälä, later merged into Harria province) in northern Estonia. According to a legend, the first ever flag of Denmark fell from sky and helped the Danes to win the battle against Revelians and Harrians. The date of the battle, June 15th, is the annual holiday of Valdemarsdag in present Denmark.
Tartu County (Estonian: Tartu maakond), or Tartumaa, is one of 15 counties of Estonia. It is located in eastern Estonia bordering to Põlva County, Valga County, Viljandi County and Jõgeva County. The area of Tartu County is 2,992.74 km², which covers 6.9% of the territory of Estonia. The population of the county is 148,992, which is 11.0% of the population of Estonia. The city of Tartu is the centre of the county located at a distance of 186 km from Tallinn. Tartu County is divided into 22 local governments — 3 urban and 19 rural municipalities.
Archaeological findings suggest that people first inhabited the territory of the current Tartu County about 5000 years ago. City of Tartu was first mentioned in historical records in 1030, then a site of a wooden stronghold. In 1224, after the conquest of the stronghold by the German invaders, Tartu became the capital of a diocese, stretching from Northern Estonia to Latvia. Since the 13th century, Tartu belonged to the Hanseatic League, and the town became a well-known trade centre in the Baltic Sea region.
Estonian (eesti keel ; IPA: [ˈeːs.ti ˈkeːl]) is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and by some ten thousand in various émigré communities. It is a Finno-Ugric language and is closely related to Finnish.
One distinctive feature that has caused a great amount of interest in linguists is that Estonian has what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that IPA /toto/, /toːto/ and /toːˑto/ are distinct, as are /toto/, /totːo/, and /totːˑo/. In actuality, the distinction isn't purely in the phoneme length, and the underlying phonological mechanism is still disputed.
Another feature that sets Estonian apart from most languages is the vowel õ ([ɤ]), a close-mid near-back unrounded vowel, which is farther back than the schwa ([ə]), but fronter than [o].
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact or German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact or Nazi-Soviet Pact and formally known as the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a non-aggression treaty between the German Third Reich and the Soviet Union. It was signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The mutual non-aggression treaty lasted until Operation Barbarossa of June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
Although officially labeled a "non-aggression treaty", the pact included a secret protocol, in which the independent countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania were divided into spheres of interest of the parties. The secret protocol explicitly assumed "territorial and political rearrangements" in the areas of these countries. Subsequently all the mentioned countries were invaded, occupied or forced to cede part of their territory by either the Soviet Union, Germany, or both.
- May 2007
Portal:Estonia/Featured article/May 2007
- June 2007
Portal:Estonia/Featured article/June 2007
- July 2007
Portal:Estonia/Featured article/July 2007
- August 2007
Portal:Estonia/Featured article/August 2007
- September 2007
Portal:Estonia/Featured article/September 2007
- October 2007
Portal:Estonia/Featured article/October 2007
- November 2007
Portal:Estonia/Featured article/November 2007
- December 2007
Portal:Estonia/Featured article/December 2007
