Meta Vannas was born on August 10, 1907, in Tallinn, in what was then part of the Russian Empire (present-day Estonia).
Meta Vannas was born on August 10, 1907, in Tallinn, a city that was at the time part of the Russian Empire and is today the capital of Estonia.
Her early years were shaped by the political and social turbulence of the early twentieth century in the Baltic region, including the upheavals of World War I and the eventual establishment of an independent Estonian state in 1918. Growing up in this environment of national awakening influenced her later engagement with Estonian cultural and athletic life.
Details of her immediate family and childhood are not extensively documented in widely available sources, but her birth in Tallinn placed her among a generation of Estonian women who came of age during the formative decades of the newly independent Republic of Estonia, a period that opened new opportunities for women in sport, education, and public life.