Clicking on the red button next to the name of the village will open the address and location of the village.
The localities inhabited by the Siberian Estonians are situated far and wide – next to the major railway lines on the fertile steppe, in the Northern taiga and in the midst of marshes, in the mountainous land not far from the Altai and Sayan mountains. Estonians reached even the Far East, settling on the shores of the Sea of Japan – the largest settlements were called Linda and Liivi (Liflyandia), but we will not discuss them at length here. The similar approach is taken to the villages of what is now the Tyumen Region and Kazakhstan.
The villages nowadays differ by the population size and native language proficiency.
Some of the villages now have more Estonians and Estonian is the main language of communication – for instance, the peripheral villages of Ülem-Suetuk, Nikolayevka (90% Estonians), Lillikülä (78% Estonians), Koidula (65%), Rozental (50%). Several villages have received representatives of other nationalities and the majority of the former Estonian settlements now boast a motley national composition (Vana-Viru, Orava, etc.). The geographically advantageous localities, evolving into modern collective farm and village council centres, attracted more representatives of other nationalities, for example the villages of Zolotaya Niva, Vambola, Kaseküla (Tomsk Region), Ivanovka, Tsvetnopolye, Uusküla. For a while, the Estonian population size in them even increased because among the newcomers were the Estonians from the smaller and peripheral villages. But as all the village people no longer lived separately by nationality, the assimilation process was rapid. In the present day a few of those villages have preserved a considerable Estonian-language community (Kaseküla, Zolotaya Niva, etc.). Although the smaller and peripheral villages are still mainly inhabited by the Estonians, the residents are forced to leave due to the difficult living conditions and poor infrastructure (Jurjevid, Liliengof, Ülem-Bulanka, Estonka, near Tara). The old village site is often already ploughed over and the only village remnants are the sunken graveyard crosses and the honeysuckle bushes, as at the Kaseküla and Aruküla sites in the vicinity of the city of Tatarsk. The Linda village in the Tomsk Region has shrunk to the walls of the last house standing. Sometimes the inhabited locality is still there, but with almost no Estonians left (e.g. the village of Estonia in the Altai Territory).