Kohtla-Järve

Kohtla-Järve is a city and municipality in Ida-Viru County in northeastern Estonia. It was founded in 1924 and incorporated as a town in 1946. Its territory is unusual among Estonian municipalities because it is discontiguous, made of several separated parts, of which the two largest are Kohtla-Järve proper, called Järve, and Ahtme. The development of the city was shaped by the extraction of oil shale and its processing into petrochemical products, which began in the twentieth century. During the Soviet occupation from 1944 to 1991 many workers were brought in from Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union, and an area that was over ninety percent ethnic Estonian in the 1934 census became overwhelmingly non-Estonian. The villages of Järve and Kukruse were first mentioned in 1241, long before the town existed.