![]() Beyond the old is an inevitable new the modern city which has emerged over 31 years. Tallinn’s historic core has an irrefutable medieval substance a yesteryear winsomeness encapsulated by the Viru Gate – the twin-towered south-eastern gap in a circle of 14th-century defensive walls that, for the most part, still stands. Neither idea could be further from the truth. The in-room devices weren’t discovered until 1994.Īnd yet, to argue that Tallinn is some Cold War theme park would be as misleading as to suggest that it is somehow a perilous choice for a city-break amid the turbulence of 2022. Sixty of the hotel’s rooms, as well as tables in the restaurant, were bugged. The former radio station on the 23rd floor, from which operatives used to eavesdrop on guests, is now a museum – left roughly as it was when its agents fled the property the night before Estonian independence. The same secret police had another hub a 10-minute walk away, in what is still the Viru hotel. The Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom tells its grim tale at two sites, including the house on Pagari Street in the Old Town, where the KGB held political prisoners in the cells now preserved in the basement. Home to an ice rink in its post-Games incarnation, it looks every inch a dour slab of Soviet architecture – partly because it has been defunct since 2010. The colossal Linnahall was built for the 1980 Moscow Olympics a 4,200-capacity venue for the sailing events that the land-locked host city could not hope to stage. Traces of that final broken window are not difficult to find in Tallinn. The latter period lasted until the formal establishment of the modern Estonian state on August 20 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed. The Estonian national identity that took root in the 19th century flowered just in time for independence in 1920, in the wake of the First World War – only for the Second to bring German, then Soviet occupation. Sweden ruled fully from 1600 to 1710 the Russian Empire followed. From the 13th to the 16th century, it found itself under Danish, Swedish or Polish control. The story of Estonia over the last millennium is one of struggle under the yoke of one European power or another. ![]() It has trodden a careful path in the shadow of Russian aggression before. But the smallest and northernmost of the Baltic states has not relished the sight of its biggest neighbour baring its military fangs. The war in Ukraine has not affected Estonia directly at least, not in terms of bombs, missiles and troops on its soil. A slight distance, but weighted with history. It is a short hop from the Estonian capital to Ivangorod, 132 miles east along the E20 highway, where the river Narva marks the border with Russia. If you listen hard, you may convince yourself that you can detect the sound of the Baltic – sighing a mile to the north.īut were there a general nervousness – and were anyone prepared to voice it – you could understand why. And when the hour hits, the bells of the Toomkirik – the 13th-century St Mary’s Cathedral, a key survivor of the 1684 fire that wiped out every wooden building in the city – send their serenade over the rooftops. Rather, there are regular clatterings of footfall across the cobbles of Tallinn’s main square murmurs of chatter from would-be diners perusing the menu outside the popular restaurant Troika. You cannot hear the drums of war in Raekoja plats.
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