Dear singers from Estonia and Finland!
Dear honorary guests Riitta Uosukainen and Toomas Savi!

Today we are singing!

We have sung common songs before. But today we are singing on the common song festival of Estonia and Finland for the first time in our history!

The Finnish bridge has now become also Estonian bridge.

The Estonian song festival has become Finnish song festival.

This is one tree with two branches.

One kin with two families.

This is one song and one festival. Our common gulf no longer separates us, it connects us. Let us therefore join also our song festivals into a single song festival, a common song festival, on this century!

This is my wish to the twenty-first century. Now, this wish is in your hands. Make my wish true in the uniting Europe, where distances disappear and songs join forces!

Make this wish true on both sides of our common gulf! We have things to sing about, and we have songs to sing! Let us sing so that the echo can still be heard in Helsinki tomorrow, and dance in Helsinki tomorrow, so that the earth will also shake here in Tallinn!

Just now, we heard the Estonian national anthem. Our souls and feelings sang with our nation and its independence. Now, we will hear to national anthem of the Republic of Finland - the token of the likeness and kinship of our nations. The tune that was for a long time banished from Estonia and liven on the northern coast of the gulf as an exile.

The words are in two languages, but the tune is one.

One festival and one future!

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