Sillamäe

Sillamäe is a town in Ida-Viru County in the northeastern part of Estonia, on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland at the mouth of the Sõtke River. It has a population of 11,824 as of 2025 and covers 12.15 square kilometres, and its population is predominantly Russian-speaking. The place, then called Sillamäggi, was first mentioned in writing in 1502 under the Livonian Order and grew into a resort village in the 1800s, where the physiologist Ivan Pavlov kept a dacha. In the 1920s and 1930s oil shale processing arrived, and from 1946 the Soviets rebuilt the plant to extract uranium, and Sillamäe remained a closed town throughout the Soviet period. It gained town status in 1957. After independence the plant was privatized as AS Silmet and became a leading world producer of niobium and tantalum products. A deep-sea port opened in 2005 and handled 4.9 million tonnes of cargo in 2011, among the largest in the Baltic states.