The biggest events in Estonia in 2022

Tallinn Music Week (TMW) is the largest indoor music festival in the Nordic and Baltic region, featuring nearly 200 Estonian and foreign artists from various musical genres.

About 25,000 people from Estonia and abroad will participate in the festival in Tallinn. In addition to the main events, which take place in the most important clubs and concert venues in the city, Tallinn Music Week also introduces the lesser-known sides of the city. Stage concerts, the TMW Stories series, restaurant festival TMW Tastes and contemporary art program TMW Art will take place all over Tallinn.

Jazzkaar is an international jazz festival that has been taking place in Tallinn for more than 20 years and is the largest of its kind in the Baltics. In addition to the main event in April, you will be able to listen to Christmas Jazz in December, which will fill churches, concert halls and clubs with beautiful jazz music at the end of November and the beginning of December. They also organise Winter Jazz and Autumn Jazz concert seasons.

If you have even a little bit of passion for extreme sports, Simple Session is for you. If you don’t want to get involved yourself, it’s also fun to watch others do crazy tricks with skateboards and other vehicles. Simple Session is the largest extreme sports competition in Europe. It takes place every year in Tallinn, Estonia and is followed around the world through social media. The latest figures show that the competition has already reached 735 million people. The world’s leading skaters and BMX riders will be there.

The next major festival (XIII Youth Song and Dance Festival) will take place in the summer of 2023. The atmosphere of this festival is indescribable. It can be fully experienced only in person – whether as a singer-dancer or a spectator. And it seems that interest in this event is growing: at the last festival, tickets ran out. The square was so crowded that it just could not fit everyone.

The most extreme event of the summer is definitely the WRC Rally, which covers almost the whole of Southern Estonia. This is a stage of the World Rally Championship, which Estonia got the right to organise only a few years ago. These high-level competitions bring the world’s top racers and a large number of foreign tourists to Estonia – through TV and the Internet, Estonia with its beautiful nature reaches millions of people around the world. The event will take place in July.

Viljandi Folk is not just a cool festival – it also has a mission. It brings people, in a concentrated, renewed or authentic form, the ancestral creations, instrumental and musical styles that would otherwise be lost in modern society. It is a cultural medium that brings together tens of thousands of people every summer. The town of Viljandi itself is worth visiting – the high castle hills, the lake, the cosiness of a small town and the energy of the festival make for a pleasant weekend.

The triathlon will bring the best of its field to Tallinn in the summer, but hobby athletes who want to test their summer bodies and challenge themselves are also welcome. The event is challenging – throughout the day you will have to cover 3.8 km by swimming, 180 km by bike and 42.2 km by running. It is considered one of the hardest one-day sporting events in the world. You can also cover half distances, but even those are long and you will have to have trained properly in advance to take part in this competition.

The Tallinn Marathon is a big national sports event that takes place every autumn. In addition to the full-length marathon, you can take part in a half marathon and a 10 km trail both by running and walking. You can participate from the age of 13. The amount of interest in this event is always huge. The competition, which has been held for more than 20 years, has changed its trajectories over the years. In the early years, it went along Pirita Road, but now the trail passes through the roads of Põhja-Tallinn, including Kultuurikatel, which has been especially exciting for participants from abroad. If you have yet to take part in this event, come try it out.

Watching a good movie is like reading a good book – you get new knowledge and food for thought, sometimes you’re shaken up a little and start thinking out of your comfort zone. That is why PÖFF is so beloved. It is the most influential cultural festival in the region. Its films can also be watched online, which has further increased interest in the event. The most recent PÖFF, held in Tallinn, included 182 feature films, 2 short films and 12 TV series.