Estonia · Old Town
Tallinn
A self-guided walking tour of the Tallinn Old Town, every street in one day.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Tallinn is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 14.0 km
- Time
- about 4 hours
- Streets
- 66
- Steps
- 3 streets with steps
- Start point
- Oleviste kirik
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Oleviste kirik 1,500 points
The tower is open from April to the end of October, and there is no lift. What there is, is a spiral of 258 medieval steps up to a platform at 60 metres, and the town flat underneath you. Take them slowly. I would.
Aleksander Nevski katedraal 500 points
This one was dropped into a garden. Until the 1890s the ground in front of the palace was the governor's park, and then this arrived on it, facing the front door. People have been arguing about it ever since. Walk all the way round it anyway. It was built to be looked at from every side.
Pikk Hermann 500 points
You cannot go in. The way to meet this one is from below: take the lane that runs along the foot of the castle wall and look up until the corner keeps going. Come early, though. Something happens up top before the day gets going, and I am not telling you what.
Raekoda 500 points
The square in front of it has been the market since the Middle Ages, which is the correct use of a square. Two things to do here. Climb the 115 steps to the belfry in summer, if your knees agree. And be down in the square on the hour: the bell up there still counts them out, once for each.
Assauwe torn 250 points
Most of the towers along this wall are shut. This one is not. From the lane it barely reads as a tower at all, just a swelling in the masonry, and the door is small and round the corner from where you would look for it. Go in. I will stay out here with the masonry, where I am comfortable.
Kiek in de Kök 250 points
It is enormous and completely solid, and the good part is underneath it. The bank of earth heaped up against its foot is hollow: passages run through it, and a guide will take you into them. It is cold in there, so bring a layer. Next door the Maiden Tower has a café in it, which is my favourite thing to find in a tower.
Kohtuotsa vaateplatvorm 250 points
There are three of these along the top of this hill and they all face different ways. This is the one everybody finds, at the end of Kohtu. Do the other two as well: one is a little way west, the other sits at the head of a long stair you have to walk anyway. Three looks at one hill. I would take all three, but then I have the time.
Poisid delfiiniga 250 points
Small, low, and standing in the busiest few metres of the whole Old Town, where everybody pours in through the gate and nobody looks down. Look down. Then look properly at the animal these two have got hold of, and hold that thought. I am not telling you the answer.
Eating
Actual food.
This town wrote its food down in other people's languages first. The oldest Estonian recipe for the pink salad everybody eats at Christmas sits in an 1824 translation of a Baltic German cookbook, filed under its German name. The curd pudding at Easter came in with Russian neighbours and never left. The glazed curd bar in every shop was made here in 1952 on machinery meant for ice cream. Under all of it, the same rye and the same barley, going nowhere. I like a menu with layers. I am mostly layers myself.
Meat and fish
Kiluvõileib
Black bread, butter, a spiced salted sprat laid along the top, and usually half a boiled egg. The sprat is a small fish of the Baltic, and before 1940 the spiced ones went out of this town in a wooden bucket with Tallinn's name on it. On the 24th of February it sits on the table beside stuffed eggs and potato salad, and the three of them are treated as one thing.
Two kinds sit in the shops. Ask for vürtsikilu, the spiced salted one, not the smoked fillets in oil.
Sources: Eesti Entsüklopeedia, ERR
Sült
Meat set solid in its own cooled broth, sliced cold. It was a holiday dish made from the head and feet of a lamb or a calf, and only in the second half of the 19th century, once pig's head had faded from the Christmas table, did households start building it out of pork. Until the end of that century it was cooled with the bones still in.
It comes with mustard on the side and it is meant to be cold. If a place offers it warm, something has gone wrong.
Sources: Eesti Entsüklopeedia
Rosolje
Beetroot, potato, herring and sour cream, chopped small and stirred until the whole bowl turns pink. The first recipe in Estonian is a translation printed in 1824, where it carries the German name Risoll. A doctor in Courland had already written the idea down in the 1670s, with radish and sweet apples in it, and noted that you left it standing until it was very nearly off. Two hundred years of arguing about the name, and nobody has laid a finger on the beetroot.
Sources: Tartu Ülikool, Eesti Entsüklopeedia
Vegetarian
Kama
A flour of roasted grain: barley, oats, rye, peas and beans in whatever combination the farm had that year. The grain was steamed or boiled, dried or scorched in the oven, then milled. Stirred into sour milk it becomes a thick porridge. It belonged to the south and the east of the country and only came north in the second half of the 19th century, so on this hill it is a newcomer of about a hundred and fifty years.
Today it usually arrives stirred into kefir or curd, or as an ice cream. Ask for it with juice or water if you would rather leave the dairy out.
Sources: Eesti Entsüklopeedia
Kohuke
A cold bar of sweetened curd under a chocolate glaze, in the chiller of every shop in the country. Curd, butter and sugar, sometimes with vanilla or raisins in it. The glazed ones were first made in Tallinn in 1952, on ice cream machinery, in the moulds meant for ice cream on a stick. The bar itself came from elsewhere. Tallinn's part was borrowing the wrong equipment, which is my favourite way of improving anything.
Sources: Eesti Piimandusmuuseum, Eesti Entsüklopeedia, ERR News, Tasting Table
Pasha
Pressed sweetened curd, shaped in a mould and eaten at Easter. By every feature it has it is a Russian dish, and it moved in and stayed. The national museum's own correspondents put its arrival at roughly the middle of the 19th century: one of them had not met it before 1912, another first tasted it in 1927. An ethnographer ruled flatly that it could not be counted as Estonian food. It is on the Easter table anyway, which is a strategy I recognise.
Sources: Eesti Rahva Muuseum, Eesti Entsüklopeedia, Postimees Tervis, Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum
Vegan
Two, and I am not padding it. The old kitchen on this coast ran on curd, butter and pork, and the part of it that never touched an animal is genuinely short: bread, cabbage, potato, peas, and whatever the forest handed over. The new cooking in this town has closed that gap completely. The traditional list has not, and I would rather say so than invent a third.
Must leib
Dark soured rye, and in this country it is called simply bread. Barley bread came first, and soured rye probably replaced it around the start of the second millennium. Until the middle of the 19th century much of it was chaff bread, stretched with what the threshing floor left over, and a loaf of pure rye was a feast day. Now the plain loaf is the feast.
Some bakeries sweeten the dough with honey or put milk in it. Ask at the counter.
Sources: Eesti Entsüklopeedia
Hapukapsad
Soured cabbage, and the shredded kind is younger here than you would guess: farms only began fermenting it that way in the 19th century. Before that whole heads or halves went into the pot to be heated through, then out into a heap in the yard or a barrel, where they soured a little and then froze, and the household chipped off what it wanted all winter. Between November and April it was most of the vitamin in the house.
As a side dish it is usually stewed with pork fat. Ask for it plain.
Sources: Eesti Rahva Muuseum, Flavours of Livonia, Eesti Rahvakultuuri Keskus
Afternoon coffee
Maiasmokk the old one
Pikk 16
Somebody has been selling coffee and sweet things on this corner since 1864, without a break, which makes it the oldest café in the country still doing it. The ground floor has been left alone for more than a hundred years: the same patterned tiles over the floor and the ceiling, the same mirrors, and the founder's photograph still watching the counter from between the boxes of sweets. Coffee and a slice cost what coffee and a slice should. A room that has refused to be redecorated for a century has my whole respect.
- Mon09:00–20:00
- Tue09:00–20:00
- Wed09:00–20:00
- Thu09:00–20:00
- Fri09:00–21:00
- Sat09:00–21:00
- Sun09:00–20:00
It is a sweet counter first and a room to sit in second. Order at the counter, then take a table in the old salon rather than the shop.
Sources: Visit Tallinn, ERR, Estonian World
Dinner
Vegan Restoran V come for the one thing: the fully plant based menu
Rataskaevu 12
Nine tables on one floor, about twenty five seats, and nothing that leaves the kitchen has ever been an animal. It opened in April 2014 as the first fully plant based restaurant in the country, and the card is tied to no single cuisine, borrowing wherever the idea is good. The old kitchen on this coast could offer a vegan two dishes and an apology. This is the town answering that, from a room the size of a front parlour.
- Mon12:00–22:00
- Tue12:00–22:00
- Wed12:00–22:00
- Thu12:00–22:00
- Fri12:00–23:00
- Sat12:00–23:00
- Sun12:00–22:00
Nine tables means you book, especially at the weekend. It is a lane away from the square, so look for the door rather than a sign.
Sources: Puhka Eestis (Ettevõtluse ja Innovatsiooni Sihtasutus), Estonian World, Taimsed Valikud (MTÜ Loomus)
Rado where locals go
Vene 7
A small personally run room on Vene, with the whole menu chalked up fresh each morning and shown to you only once you are through the door. Street level is busy and the cellar underneath it is not, so pick your mood. Often there is one ingredient on the plate and very little else, treated seriously, and the bill stays moderate. It closes on Sundays, which in this Old Town is the surest sign that a kitchen is cooking for the people who live here.
- Mon12:00–23:00
- Tue12:00–23:00
- Wed12:00–23:00
- Thu12:00–23:00
- Fri12:00–23:00
- Sat12:00–23:00
- Sunclosed
The menu is not published anywhere, so bring an appetite and no plan. The room is small, so ring ahead for an evening table.
Sources: MICHELIN Guide, Flavours of Estonia
Checked 7 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Tallinn.
Tallinn is two words chewed into one. The back half is linn, a town. The front half is usually read as taani, Danish, which makes this the Danes' town and makes the name a receipt for who once held the hill. Not everyone is convinced: the Danish national encyclopedia points out that the reading wants a short vowel the word has not got. Before that the place answered to Lyndanise, then to Reval, and in Russian chronicles to Kolyvan. Four names for one rock, and I outlasted all four.
Sources: arhiiv.eki.ee; lex.dk
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Start with what this place has not got. No navigable river, no long fjord cutting inland, so the country Tallinn could trade with was smaller than Riga's or Narva's. What it has instead is a limestone hill on the north coast, a bay on one side, a lake of nearly ten square kilometres behind it that has watered the town since the 1300s, and the road east to the Russian markets running past the door. The oldest thing under the town hall is a small fortified house of local limestone. A town cut out of its own hill. I take that personally, in the good way.
Sources: lex.dk; raekoda.tallinn.ee; lex.dk
Why then
When the first stone went down.
There are three birthdays here and I like that. Estonians held a stronghold called Lindanise up on Toompea in the tenth or eleventh century, well before anyone sailed in from the west. The Danes came in 1219 and put their own castle on the limestone hill. And the settlement down the slope only became a town in the legal sense in 1248, when Erik Ploughpenny handed it the Lübeck charter and it was allowed to run itself. A place, then a fort, then paperwork. The paperwork is the one everybody celebrates.
Sources: www.riigikogu.ee; lex.dk; raekoda.tallinn.ee
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1219–1346
Denmark. Valdemar II took northern Estonia in 1219 and the Danish crown held this hill for most of the next hundred and thirty years, with one gap: a knightly order ran the place from 1227 until the Stensby agreement handed it back in 1238. Then in 1346 Valdemar IV sold Danish Estonia to the Teutonic Order for nineteen thousand marks of silver, because he needed the money at home. A whole province, priced.
- 1346–1561
The Order. Tallinn changed hands with the province, and for two hundred years the hill belonged to a knightly order that ran a state of its own. The town did well out of it. It had been in the Hanseatic League since 1285 at the latest, the northernmost member there ever was, it held the right to handle the trade coming from the east, and it spent these centuries getting rich and building most of what you are about to walk past. When the order's state fell apart in 1561, the town went looking for a new owner.
Sources: raekoda.tallinn.ee; lex.dk
- 1561–1710
Sweden. With the order's state gone, the town put itself under the Swedish king, and the nobility up on the hill did the same. The Swedes decided the medieval convent building in the middle of the castle was not a fit place to receive anybody, so they built a State Hall against the western wall and finished it in August 1589. Two kings met in it that month. Its big windows are still cut into that wall and you can see them from below.
Sources: lex.dk; www.riigikogu.ee
- 1710–1918
Russia. Tallinn passed to the Russian empire in 1710 and spent the next century turning into a serious port and the seat of a Russian province. Catherine II slept one night at Kadriorg in 1764 in a room with single windows, took cold, and had a palace put up on Toompea between 1767 and 1773 so that it could not happen again. That is the pink one, and it is the only building I know of that exists because somebody was chilly.
Sources: lex.dk; www.riigikogu.ee
- 1918–
Estonia. From 1918 Tallinn was the capital of a country of its own, and the new republic wanted a parliament to sit in. It went up in the castle courtyard between 1920 and 1922, on the foundations of the medieval convent, and as far as anyone knows it is the only expressionist parliament building in the world. Self-rule stopped in 1940 and came back in 1991. The building waited. Waiting is most of what I do. I have never met a better waiter.
Sources: lex.dk; www.riigikogu.ee
The emblem
What the shield means.
This is not the city's shield. Tallinn's small arms are a silver cross on a red field, and the great arms are three blue lions with gold crowns on gold. Both came from the Danish kings, which fits a town whose name may say the same thing. Neither survives being shrunk: a cross is a cross at this size, and three lions become three smudges. So the icon is a building instead, the pair of towers at the Viru gate. They are what is left of a forework built into the fourteenth-century town wall, and they are how most people walk into the Old Town. Two towers and a gap between them. I take the gap.
Sources: et.wikipedia.org; www.visittallinn.ee
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The Old Town is two towns. Toompea up on the rock was its own political unit with its own rules, and the lower town down the slope was another one, and the two were only put together administratively in 1878. That is why the street plan does what it does, and why the two links between them are called the Long Leg and the Short Leg. You will walk both. One of them is a staircase.
Sources: lex.dk
About 1.85 kilometres of the town wall is still standing, with 26 towers, two inner gates and pieces of two forward gates. That is one of the largest surviving sets in Europe, and a stretch of it between the Nun's, Sauna and Golden Foot towers is open to walk along, up on top. The lane that runs beside it is called Müürivahe, between the walls, which is exactly what it does.
Sources: www.visittallinn.ee
What went on the World Heritage list in 1997 was not the buildings. It was the whole frame: the town wall, the street network, and even the property boundaries, still lying where they were laid in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Which makes the lanes the monument. I have never been so pleased to hear that my dinner is protected by treaty.
Sources: raekoda.tallinn.ee; www.muinsuskaitseamet.ee
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- käik
- A passage. Katariina käik, Bremeni käik, Börsi käik. Wide enough for one rock and one person, which is my preferred ratio.
- plats
- A square. Raekoja plats in front of the town hall, Lossi plats in front of the castle, Kiriku plats beside the church. Each one named after whatever it is standing next to, which saves everybody a lot of thinking.
- jalg
- A leg, and there are exactly two: Pikk jalg, the long one, and Lühike jalg, the short one. They are the two ways up from the lower town to the upper. Everybody who ever ran this place walked up one of them.
- mägi
- A hill. Olevimägi and Sulevimägi both climb out of the lower town, both are short, both are steep, and both are paved with the good stuff.
- trepp
- A stair that counts as a street. Patkuli trepp runs down the outside of the hill, and Pilstickeri trepp is named after one of the castle's corner towers. Both have dots on them. Steps are streets.
- suur- / väike-
- Big and small, and here they come in pairs. Suur-Karja and Väike-Karja are the big and the little cattle street; Suur-Kloostri and Väike-Kloostri are the big and the little cloister street. A lane named after cows is a lane I trust.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Tallinn in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 66streets
- 693dots
- 11.3km of street
- 14.0km on foot
- 4hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.