We went to Tallinn for a few days in late September 2002, flying out on a Sunday evening and returning on a Wednesday afternoon -- not long enough to see all that the city offered, but that was the package (at £300 per person including flights and hotel). Here are some photographs, starting with a view of the Lower Town from Toompea, the upper (and first settled) part which was formerly occupied by the aristocracy and is now the location of the national Parliament, several government ministries and the swisher foreign embassies. The photograph below was taken in mid-morning, looking north towards the Gulf of Finland. The tall spire to the right of centre belongs to St Olav's Church, which when completed in 1267 was one of the tallest buildings in the world. (The original spire was taller than the current one, erected following a fire in 1820.) The green colour of the tower is an artefact of the netting on scaffolding around it; the building was under restoration during our visit and so not open to the public.

The date of Tallinn's foundation is unknown; the Arab geographer al-Idrisi marked it on his world map in 1154, but Estonia did not then exist as a nation -- nor for many centuries afterwards. It was ruled by the Danes from 1219, by the Germans from 1346, by the Swedes from 1561, and by the Russians from 1710. Despite this history of conquest (at one point in the 1570s, continuing warfare between the Swedes and the Russians so impoverished its economy that the city's population was reduced to a few thousands), Tallinn has some of the finest medieval and post-medieval architecture in northern Europe, and the Old Town area (which covers both Toompea and the Lower Town) is now entered on the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites.

The two photographs below show Pikk Hermann (on the left) and the Alexander Nevsky cathedral (with the Virgin's Tower in the foreground) from one of the upper floors of Kiek in de Kok (see the next paragraph for an explanation of that structure):

    

Kiek in de Kok means "Peep in the Kitchen", because the higher one climbs inside the tower the more of the interiors of other buildings one can see. Construction commenced in the 15th century, and was more or less completed in the 17th; its walls are some 4 metres thick. It is now a museum (of the city's defences) and art gallery. The tower appears in the left photograph below; on the right is St Nicholas Church, founded in the 13th century as a dual military/religious institution and gradually expanded over the next four hundred years. Ironically, the church (now deconsecrated, and used as a concert hall) can only be seen so clearly because of the Soviet air raid of 9 March 1944, which destroyed many of the buildings around it.

    

There are two pedestrian ways down from Toompea into the Lower Town -- Luhike Jalg ("Short Leg") and Pikk Jalg ("Long Leg"), giving rise to the saying that Tallinn is lame. The entrances to both were once heavily defended; below, on the left, is the tower which marks the bottom end of Pikk Jalg. On the right, to show what use is now made of the old defences, is "Sweater Wall", open-air stalls selling pullovers and other woollen garments by the Viru Gate. Given the prevailing temperature (around 10C), they seemed to be doing reasonably brisk business (albeit that such isn't evident from this picture).

    

Adjacent to Sweater Wall is St Catherine's Passage, formerly associated with the (now ruined) Dominican Monastery further along the same street. The passage is chiefly notable for its souvenir shops (we glanced briefly through the windows, but didn't buy anything) and the aerial buttresses which prevent it from collapsing in upon itself; see below, left. Below right is the town hall, erected in 1404 and generally regarded as the best preserved Gothic building in northern Europe. Unfortunately, the angle of the sun (late morning -- but remember the high latitude) means that the picture's not as good as it could have been:

    

Our last photograph of Tallinn is of the rather inelegantly-named Fat Margaret's Tower, built between 1510 and 1529, with walls some 6 metres thick. Perhaps for this reason, it was used as a prison from 1830 onwards. It now houses the small but comprehensive Maritime Museum:

We also went on a day-long excursion out of Tallinn, to Lahemaa National Park on the north coast to the east of the city. Known as "the Land of the Bays", Lahemaa was given national protection (against Soviet opposition) in 1971, saving it from both oil shale extraction and shoddy tower blocks for the heroic workers (although the introductory leaflet handed out to visitors by the park authorities dates from the Soviet period and is priced in kopeks). Its chief features are forests, marshes, fishing villages -- and the highest waterfall in Estonia, at Jagala. In a country sanded as flat by the Quarternary Glaciation as Estonia, seven metres is not to be sneezed at:

During the Soviet period, much of the coast was a restricted military zone and in-shore fishing, the staple activity of its inhabitants, was forcibly suspended. (This seems not to have been a hardship for the rest of Estonia as, despite its geographic location, the Estonians have little fish in their diet.) Fishing has been revived in some areas, but many of the houses in the coastal villages have been bought up as holiday cottages or weekend retreats by richer Tallinners -- who owns which being immediately distinguishable by their gardens: the holiday homes are laid almost entirely to lawn, while those lived in year-round are given over to vegetable growing, the better to keep money expenditure to a minimum in the subsistence-level economy of those left behind by the dash to membership of the EU.

The buildings below, at the fishing village of Altja, are actually sheds for storing boats, nets and other equipment. They're picturesque, nevertheless:

At the centre (or close to it) of the Park is Palmse Manor, a tasteful country house demonstrating the most benevolent aspects of rule by the Baltic-Germans (as they were known). Construction began in 1697, but was delayed by the Northern War between Sweden and Russia and not completed until 1740. It was owned by the von der Pahlen family, a solid and successful bourgeois bunch who (according to the Bradt guide to Estonia) "distilled as profitably as they ran the Baltic Railway Company; their paintings are as worthy as their botanical research". They occupied the house until 1923, when the estate was nationalised; the building is now the Park visitor centre. Below are two views of the house, front and back; below that is a photograph of Judith by the small lake at the bottom of the garden: