Tallinn

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.

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

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.

Sources: lex.dk, lex.dk

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

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 68streets
• 722dots
• 12.0km of street
• 15.7km on foot
• 4.5hours at a stroll