We woke up early enough to be at the ferry terminal by 8:30 am for a 9 am departure. It was an uneventful but very windy transit; fortunately, the MS Finland is a huge ferry that didn't sway at all. We landed in Tallinn at 10:30 am and right away started on the serious business of being tourists. We started with a visit to the KGB cells, which made us dive straight into Estonia's troubled past. It was a bone of contention between Denmark and Sweden for many years, but at last Sweden won in the 1700's. In the mid 1800's Estonia fought to become independent, and no sooner had the Swedes agreed to its independence when Russia nabbed the young state and held on to it through the Bolshevik revolution, when it became a part of the USSR. The Germans invaded Estonia during World War II and managed it for a few years, but at the end of the war Estonia went back to the USSR, and suffered its fair share under the dictatorship of Stalin and the terror of the KGB. Finally, in 1989, as the USSR fell apart Estonia regained its independence and became a member of the European Union. The country is prosperous, and the capital city, Tallinn, is a real gem of a town.
Seems to me there is no love lost between Estonia and Russia. We walked past the Russian embassy and the sidewalk was crowded with posters calling for Russia to stop the genocide in Ukraine, stop working toward a nuclear war, and generally stop abusing human rights.
We spent most of our time in the very charming Old Town, which is the medieval core of the city. Unfortunately, it is Monday, when a lot of the museums are closed, but we had fun visiting the old City Hall museum and climbing the 140 very steep steps of its tower. I almost died but had to agree that the view was worth the effort. We also visited the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit, which as Lutheran churches go had a lot to show, and St. Olaf's church, which was rather non-descript but which had a huge tower that Géraldine and Lucas climbed to get some great shots of the city. We finished our museum spree with a visit to the Maritime Museum, which was very well done. It is housed in one of the very fat towers that mark the entrance to the old walled city, and is developed over four circular levels. The bottom level is devoted to the prize of the collection, a cargo cogg that was discovered buried in sand in the bay, and which upon recovery yielded a sample of a varied cargo of pots, clothes, hides, and other common merchandises from the Middle Ages. From there the museum climbs through the evolution of sailing vessels, steam ships, and motor-powered ships, with all sorts of hands-on displays to illustrate the art of navigation, and the role that maritime traffic through the Baltic had from the Middle Ages to the Hansa Trade, through modern times. By the way, Tallinn got hit by the Bubonic Plague during the Middle Ages on a couple of occasions.
The rest of the time we just walked through the old town, admiring its many plazas and quaint buildings, which in tradesman fashion had the living quarters in the bottom floor and the warehouse space in the upper floors. Tallinn was part of that trade route established by the Vikings between England and Russia (which in turn extended its own traffic network through the middle and far East).
Outside of the Old Town Tallinn is a modern European city
with an excellent system of trams (I know because we took one to go to dinner
and I later rode another to its terminus and back), a neighborhood with
Russian-style wood houses, many commercial centers, big blocks of modern
apartment buildings, and lots of glass-fronted company headquarters. One could
definitively live here.
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