The history of local settlements goes back to ancient times. The first tribes started settling  here, on the coasts of the Finnish Bay, about 9,000 years BC. Big grey boulders are witnesses of those times. All the northern part of Estonia, especially the coast, is covered with an infinite number of such boulders, and some of them are really huge. These granite boulders were brought here by the melting glacier.

So our boulders were 'imported' from Scandinavia. All the local soil is strewn with these boulders, and every spring the Earth pushes up to the surface more and more stone traces of the post-ice age. That's why all the works in the fields are started with clearing them from innumerable stones.

By the way, smaller boulders were used for domestic needs, and even now they find practical application, such as for building foundations of houses, lining outer walls, making open fireplaces, beautiful stone fences and decorative stone gardens.

All of this you can see in the socalled Swedish village, Kallavere, which has found itself on the territory of Maardu, but which keeps its independence.

The next stage of development of the place is connected with the appearance of Swedes on the coast. According to historians, Swedes, or Vikings, as they were called inthose days, began settling down on the local islands in the 8th century AD. Then they started moving to the coast, forming a number of settlements. Some of the settkements have survived to our days, as it happened in the region of Maardu.

It's not known when the Swedish village Kallavere came into being, but for the first time it was mentioned in the Danish chronicles of the 13th century, when the Danes ruled most part of the Estonians' territory. The inhabitants of Kallavere try hard to keep its history and traditions alive.

|The further turbulent development of these quiet fishing villages was connected with the epoch of industrialization at the end of the 19th century, when a rich deposit of phosphorites was found here. Its development was started during the firstRepublic of Estonia in the 20s of the 20th century. It was then that the first mine was started, and in 1925 the first concentrating plant was built. In 1938, the plant burnt down, but already in 1939 the jointstock company Eesti Fosforiit started building a new plant. A small village, MaardAfter the war the plant was enlarged, and the old residents of Maardu remember perfectly well the distant 1950-s, when volunteers started coming here despite hard life. They had to live in barracks, their food was meager, but they lived merrily.

In Soviet times, the plant was turned into a powerful chemical plant «Estonfosforit», where millions of tons of phosphate ore were mined and 15 sorts of production were produced.

After Estonia regained its independence, the green movement started protesting against damaging emission into the atmosphere, and «Estonfosforit» was closed down. Perhaps somewhere in the future new technologies will make mining of phosphate ore possible again, but meanwhile the town has other ways of development. |u, came into being around it.

The period of the Russian government was progressive enough for the development of local economy. Peter the Great was a wise statesman, and he understood the importance of the sea routes perfectly well. That's why he, having conquered the territory, decided to have a deep-sea port built. His attention was drawn by the local bay, but fishermen dissuaded him from this idea, saying that the precipice was not stable there, or «creeping.». The Tsar agreed and started building the port in Paldiski.

However, about 200 years later history made its next turn, and in 1986 here, near Maardu, the largest port in Estonia was built, which gave a new impulse to the development of the town. Most of the adult residents of Maardu work in the New Tallinn Port. Geopolitically, Estonia is a transit country, and Maardu became the transit gate of the republic. Unfortunately, political trends and the world economic crisis caused abrupt reduction of transit, but all this might be just signs of time, which has a tendency to change.