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National Geographic : 1980 Apr
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the bonfire that flickered over a merriment of singers and dancers, zithers and fiddles. UNARLIKE MOUNTAINS of ash, resi due from 55 years of oil-shale mining, loomed on the horizon for miles as we drove toward Kohtla-Jarve, a new city born of postwar industrialization. The air was heavy, the Queen Anne's lace by the road side hung brown and wilted. Ninety thou sand people, mostly Russian immigrants, now live in Estonia's third largest town, a warren of box-shaped apartments and bril liantly colored billboards extolling the glory of work. The two imposing oil-shale-burning pow er plants in this area supply enough electric ity to share with Leningrad and much of the northwestern Soviet Union. Miners extract 30 million tons of shale a year, and reserves should last for the next 200 years at the present rate. Increasingly sensitive to the environ ment, the industry has been successfully reclaiming strip-mined land, planting fir forests where once there was only bog. THE LAND seemed broad and open on the drive south to Tartu, with a sawtooth ho rizon of pine tops dark over the gold of barley. No billboards or service stations marred the landscape of cornflowers and black-eyed Susans, stands of white birch, and mustard-colored farmhouses settled into nests of fruit trees. As we drove down the road, a horse drawn wagonload of Gypsies clattered past. Tartu, with more than 100,000 people Es tonia's second city, lies in the valley of the broad Emaj6gi (Mother River), an area em braced by Estonians as the soul of their na tion. Tartu has been a university town since Swedish King Gustavus II founded a school in 1632. In the Germanic era, it was a center of academic life in northeastern Europe. Today Tartu State University is one of six institutes of higher learning in Estonia, and the most prestigious; only half the applicants pass its stiff entrance exams. But education is free, and 70 percent of the 3,600 full-time students receive forty-ruble-a -month sti pends, about half their living expenses. The road south to V6ru wound through the least pampered part of Estonia. A sign 507
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