(6 Jul 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tallinn, Estonia - 5 July 2025
1. Wide of people standing at the Song and Festival grounds
2. Various of choir singing
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tallinn, Estonia - 3 July 2025
3. People dancing
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tallinn, Estonia - 5 July 2025
4. Various of choir singing
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tallinn, Estonia - 3 July 2025
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Piret Jakobson, singer:
++PARTLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 1-4++
"Estonians are always getting through the hard times through songs and dances. If it’s hard, we sing together and that brings everything back together and then we forget our troubles."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tallinn, Estonia - 5 July 2025
6. Rasmus Puur conducting choir
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tallinn, Estonia - 4 July 2025
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Rasmus Puur, conductor at the song festival:
++PARTLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 6,8-10++
"The situation we are in today, the war in Ukraine that influences us and we want to feel as one today more than six years ago and we want to feel that we are part of Estonia and to feel it like physically that one tenth of our population is here and we can feel as a one."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tallinn, Estonia - 5 July 2025
8. Choir singing
9. Various of spectators watching
10. Wide of the Song Festival grounds
11. Various of singers and dancers marching during the parade before the song festival
12. SOUNDBITE (English) Taavi Pentma, dancer:
“It’s really good with all Estonian people to do the same thing. So we are, like, breathing in one and the heart is beating (as one).”
13. Choir singing
STORYLINE:
Thousands of voices united in song Saturday at Estonia's traditional choir festival.
More than 21,000 singers took part in the traditional Song and Dance celebration.
Despite heavy rain a huge crowd packed out the Song Festival Grounds, a massive outdoor venue in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.
Decades ago the event inspired resistance to Soviet control and was later recognized by the U.N.'s cultural agency.
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.
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 The Associated Press on Friday.
The tradition dates back to the time when Estonia was part of the Russian Empire.
The first song celebration was held in 1869 in the sou... [truncated]
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