Kohtla-Järve

Kohtla-Järve (Estonian: [ˈkohtlɑ ˈjærʋe]) is a city and municipality in Ida-Viru County, northeastern Estonia, founded in 1924 and incorporated as a town in 1946. The city is unusual among Estonian municipalities due to its discontiguous territorial span, being made of several separated parts, with the two largest of Kohtla-Järve proper (referred to as Järve) and Ahtme, both of which have populations of around 20,000 residents, being located about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) apart, with the now separated town of Jõhvi located between them. Several other settlements in north-eastern Ida-Viru county are administratively districts of Kohtla-Järve. Kohtla-Järve is presently the fifth-largest city in Estonia in terms of population.

Industrial oil shale extraction, which began in the 20th century, and processing into petrochemical products have strongly shaped the city's development. During the 1944–1991 Soviet occupation, large numbers of immigrant workers were brought from Russia and other parts of the former USSR and populated the city turning the area which had been, as of 1934 census, over 90% ethnic Estonian, overwhelmingly non-Estonian in the second half of the 20th century. As of 2006, 21% of the city's population are ethnic Estonians; most of the rest are Russians.