In Europe, the Indo-European languages dominate. Apart from the isolated language Basque (and the Semitic Maltese and Turkish spoken in Eastern Thrace), there is a second language family, the Finno-Ugric languages. It includes Finnish, Estonian, Livonian, which is native to the Latvian Courland, and Hungarian. Sami, spoken in Lapland, also belongs to the Uralic languages. The ancestors of the Finno-Ugric peoples came from Siberia east of the Urals. On granite rocks on the shores of Lake Onega in Karelia, called Äänisjärv in Estonian, Estonians discovered about 1,200 Neolithic petroglyphs around 1840 - dated to an age of about 6,000 years - which depict the symbolic life cycle of the Finno-Ugric people. A swan carries the sun across the sky. A moose and a hunter form further motifs. In 1970, Lennart Meri - President of Estonia from 1992 to 2001 - made a documentary film entitled "Waterfowl People" about the Finno-Ugric peoples and their ancient traditions. The sculptor Al Paldrok, who together with the graphic designer Madis Põldsaar designed the coin with the swan as the central motif, made tracings of the symbols depicted on the coin (using a process called brass rubbing of the surface structure onto a laid paper) in 1984 as part of a scientific expedition. On the day the coin was issued, the World Congress of Finno-Ugric and Sami Peoples - held every four years alternately in Russia, Hungary, Finland or Estonia - was opened in Tartu. |
