TALLINN, Estonia >> The voices of tens of thousands of choir singers rang out in the rain in Estonia on Sunday, and a huge crowd of spectators erupted in applause, unfazed by the gloomy weather.

The Song Festival Grounds, a massive outdoor venue in the Estonian capital Tallinn, was filled with spectators Saturday evening despite the downpour, and absolutely packed on Sunday, with even more people attending. The traditional Song and Dance Celebration, which decades ago inspired resistance to Soviet control and was later recognized by the U.N.’s cultural agency, attracted tens of thousands of performers and spectators alike, many in national costume.

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.

This year, tickets to the main event -— a seven-hour concert on Sunday featuring choirs of all ages -— sold out weeks in advance.

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.

High emotional point

The theme of the song festival this year is dialects and regional languages, and the repertoire is a mix of folk songs, well-known patriotic anthems that are traditionally sung at these celebrations and new pieces written specifically for the occasion.

The festival’s artistic director, Heli Jürgenson, says that although the audience won’t know all the songs -— especially those sung in dialects -— there will be many opportunities to sing along.

The main concert on Sunday night will end with a song called “My Fatherland is My Love” —- a patriotic song Estonians spontaneously sang at the 1960 festival in protest against the Soviet regime. Every song celebration since 1965 has concluded with this anthem in what both performers and spectators describe as the highest emotional point of the whole event.

An emotional Jürgenson, who this year will conduct a combined choir of about 19,000 people singing it, said: “This is a very special moment.” She believes that what drove the tradition more than 150 years ago still drives it today.

“There have been different turning points, there have been a lot of historical twists, but the need for singing, songs and people have remained the same,” she said. “There are certain songs that we always sing, that we want to sing. This is what keeps this tradition going for over 150 years.”

Soviet occupation

The tradition to hold massive first song-only, then song and dance festivals dates back to the time when Estonia was part of the Russian Empire.

The first song celebration was held in 1869 in the southern city of Tartu. It heralded a period of national awakening for Estonians, when Estonian-language press, theater and other things emerged, says Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, associate professor at the University of Tartu.

The festivals continued throughout a period of Estonia’s independence between the two world wars and then during the nearly 50 years of Soviet occupation.

The Soviet rulers were into “mass spectacles of all kinds, so in a way it was very logical for the Soviet regime to tap into this tradition and to try to co-opt it,” Seljamaa said in an interview.

Estonians had to sing Soviet propaganda songs in Russian during that time, but they were also able to sing their own songs in their own language, which was both an act of defiance and an act of therapy for them, she said.

At the same time, the complicated logistics of putting together a mass event like that taught Estonians to organize, Seljamaa said, so when the political climate changed in the 1980s, the protest against the Soviet rule naturally came in the form of coming together and singing.

The unity extended beyond Estonia’s borders. During the Singing Revolution, 2 million people in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands to form a 600-kilometer (370-mile) human chain that protested Soviet occupation of the Baltics with a song.