Tallinn’s old town still has two kilometres of its city wall and twenty-six of its towers, which makes it one of the most complete medieval centres in northern Europe. It was not rebuilt after the war the way Warsaw and Gdańsk were. It largely came through, and the difference is visible in the stone.

It is also small enough to walk end to end in fifteen minutes, which means the whole of it fills with cruise passengers between about eleven and four on summer days, and empties completely by seven.

Upper town and lower town

Two towns, historically, with separate laws and a gate between them that was locked at night. Toompea on the limestone hill belonged to the nobility and the bishops. The lower town belonged to the merchants of the Hanseatic League, and they had money.

The two viewing terraces on Toompea, Kohtuotsa and Patkuli, are free and both look north over the roofs. Kohtuotsa is the one with the graffito reading “the times we had”, which somebody painted on a wall and which has since become the standard photograph.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, at the top, was built by the Russian empire in 1900 in a deliberate assertion of ownership, directly facing the parliament. Estonians planned to demolish it in 1924 and did not.

Down in the lower town, Raekoja plats has the only surviving Gothic town hall in northern Europe, finished 1404, with a weathervane of a guard called Old Thomas on the spire since 1530. The pharmacy on the same square has been trading from that spot since at least 1422 and is still a working chemist.

Two churches, one with 258 steps

St Olaf’s was, by one reading of the records, the tallest building in the world between 1549 and 1625, at 159 metres. Lightning knocked the spire off at least eight times. It is now 123 metres, and 258 steps up a narrow spiral gets you to an outdoor platform with no glass, which is not the place to find out about vertigo.

The KGB used the tower as a radio point precisely because it was the highest thing around.

St Nicholas’s, burnt out in the Soviet air raid of March 1944, is now a museum, and it holds a fragment of Bernt Notke’s Danse Macabre from the late fifteenth century: death leading a pope, an emperor and a cardinal away by the hand, with the paint still bright.

Linnahall, and the other century

Moscow hosted the 1980 Olympics and the sailing was held in Tallinn, so the Soviet Union built a concert hall and ice rink on the waterfront, a vast low slab of concrete with steps sweeping up over the roof to the sea.

It closed in 2010 and has been decaying since. The interior is sealed, the exterior is covered in graffiti and broken slabs, and you can still walk up the steps and sit on the roof looking at the harbour, which people do at sunset. It was listed as a heritage monument in 1997, which is why it has not been demolished, and no plan to restore it has yet found the money.

Ten minutes further, Patarei is a sea fortress from 1840 that became a prison under Estonia, then the Soviets, then Estonia again, closing in 2002. Parts open as a memorial museum of communist crimes, and it is grim in the specific way that a building left with its fittings in place is grim.

Kalamaja and Telliskivi

Between the old town and the sea, Kalamaja is a district of two-storey wooden houses built for factory workers around 1900, painted in soft colours, and it is now the part of the city people actually want to live in.

Telliskivi Creative City, a former electrical works, holds studios, a food hall, a street-art strip along the railway and the Fotografiska outpost. It runs a flea market on Saturdays.

Eat elk soup, black bread, marinated eel, or sprats on rye. Kohuke, a curd bar in chocolate, is what Estonians grew up on and costs under a euro in any supermarket.

What to drink

Vana Tallinn is a dark rum liqueur with citrus and cinnamon, made since 1960, and it is what every Estonian grandmother has in the cupboard. It is sweet and it is better in coffee than on its own.

The medieval-themed restaurants on the main square, with staff in costume and honeyed beer, are a tourist construction that dates from the 1990s and they know it. The food is fine and the prices are square prices.

Estonia has a real craft brewing scene now, concentrated in Telliskivi and Kalamaja, and the beer halls there charge about half what the old town does. Põhjala’s tap room in a former submarine factory is the one people name first.

The digital thing

Estonia runs almost all its government online, has done since the early 2000s, and free public wifi has been ordinary here for longer than in most of western Europe. It matters to a visitor mainly in small ways: card payment works everywhere including on a bus, parking is done by phone, and paperwork tends not to exist.

The e-residency programme, launched in 2014, lets non-residents run an EU company from abroad, and it has issued cards to people in more than 170 countries.

The fast ferry crosses to Helsinki in two hours, and Finns come the other way in numbers for the cheaper alcohol. Stockholm is an overnight sailing west.

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