Tallinn

The black bread in Lithuania at its freshest best is more like aerated treacle toffee than anything made of grain.  I found I could eat it in quite astonishing quantities.  Food otherwise is inclined to be simple  - meat, cured meat, soups, pickles, plainly cooked vegetables and, at this time of year, plenty of fruit.  To go with the good bread, there are greater tests of the bakers skill in tarts, cheesecakes and other pastry confections not to mention the ubiquitous marzipan.  In the window of the most famous and oldest cafe/confectioner in Tallinn, Malasmokk, too overcrowded with tourists at this time of year to sit in, there are marzipan houses and an entire population of marzipan figures.

In fact in two days we had a lot of ground to cover and not too much time for frequenting cafes. Estonia is wonderfully proud of itself and its emergence as a successful independent country and member of the EU from a history of serial invasion and occupation until the fall of the Soviet Union. Tallinn is a showcase for that history and for national amour propre.  The town is spotless and there are enough museums almost for every day of the year.  They include Kumu the rather spectacular modern art gallery opened in 2006, the comfortably sized Kadriorg Palace with its art collections, lovely baroque rooms and splendid tiled stoves, built by Peter the Great for his wife, the Empress Catherine and a wide range of smaller showcases such as the City Museum and the Museum of Occupations.  All history good or bad is to be remembered it seems and, where possible, celebrated.  The collections are not in general extraordinary or famous but the very best is made of what is available and, as a result, the viewer looks carefully at exhibits that might be passed over when faced with better known and theoretically internationally more important works and absorbs to a greater extent the history of each one.

The tall black church spires,with what remains of the city walls round the old city have made the remarkable skyline of Tallinn through centuries.  It must have seemed the setting for fairy tales when viewed from the chilly Baltic Sea on the deck of an approaching ship.  Now the modern town surrounds the old but the towering pinnacles of churches like the Niguliste and the Oleviste, not to mention that of the town hall with its soldier weather vane, Old Thomas, standing high above the red tiled towers of the city walls, remain the town's greatest landmarks and signposts.

Their interiors are the spare and whitewashed Gothic reminiscent of 16th and 17th century paintings of Dutch and Belgian church interiors and just as attractive and welcoming.  The towering space of the Niguliste, restored after Soviet bombing raids in 1944, is a repository of treasures such as a gloriously humorous Danse Macabre where death is definitely en fete unlike his rather grand victims. The Dome church has huge box pews at ground level and above them the family boxes, like enclosed opera boxes, of two of Tallinn's most powerful families.  Other families are remembered in the highly ornate armorial shields that cover the walls and in a variety of grand tombs. Most churches are possessors of beautiful and highly decorated organs.

The 14th century Church of the Holy Ghost adjacent to the Town Hall Square in particular has the atmosphere of a place both used and loved. It is more like a refectory with its painted galleries and air of welcome even when empty of people.  There is a real and unusual sense in all the churches of their role as centres of the community which cannot always have been the case. Now huge numbers of tourists are temporarily grafted on to the core of that community which for all its friendliness manages to remain somehow aloof and untouched or that at least is the rather comforting sense in the streets of greater Tallinn from very short experience.  That experience included a visit to the Estonian Open Air Museum, where traditional buildings have been transported and rebuilt from all over the country.  An ersatz, touristic glimpse of real country life it may be but away from the particularly overpopulated areas where tour groups congregate in force, a walk through the woods and by the sea there on a nice day is a pleasure and whets the appetite for a proper driving tour of the countryside of the Baltic States on another occasion.

We stayed conveniently centrally and quite comfortably in the Old Town in the Rixwell Olevi hotel, in a mildly decrepit originally 15th century building.  An initial hiccup with our first night booking after an extremely delayed arrival without any luggage courtesy of British Airways landed us one night in the typical contemporary hotel tower block of the Radisson Olumpia.  Little to be said about that beyond mention of the grimly plastic Sports Bar where we had a late night drink in the absence of dinner and the spectacular view of the city - a distinctly redeeming feature.  On the strength of some level of perceived fault on the part of the Olevi in not fitting us in that night in spite of a booking due to 'technical difficulties' that were either water or electricity related, they gave us a discount which rather made up for the Sports Bar.

Other famous sites of old Tallinn very close to the Hotel include the splendid variety of houses along Pikk Street, most famously, the House of the Blackheads, once owned by the Brotherhood of the Blackheads, the young, single merchants who had not yet graduated to membership of the Great Guild.  The Great Guild Hall on the same street is now the Estonian History Museum.  Unexpectedly these early buildings are neighboured by the glorious Art Nouveau Draakoni House with its splendid dragons and Egyptian figures as well as the 19th century apartment block that was once the HQ of Soviet security.