Tallinn Old Town in a quiet year

The city that was still there

I arrived in Tallinn in mid-May of 2020 in circumstances nobody would have chosen. International travel had only recently become possible again, in a partial and tentative way, and I had made the decision to come not because conditions were ideal but because I needed to go somewhere real and Tallinn was reachable. The flight from London was a quarter full. The tram from the airport was nearly empty. I walked through Viru Gate into an Old Town I’d last seen on a busy September weekend two years before, and the difference was extraordinary.

Not unpleasant. Not sad, exactly. Just very, very quiet.

The cobblestones on Raekoja plats were wet from overnight rain. A café was open, its chairs still folded on the tables outside. A man was walking a dog across the square in the unhurried way of someone who has reclaimed territory that usually belongs to someone else. Two pigeons. A bicycle propped against the Town Hall wall. That was the whole scene.

What the quiet changed

Tallinn’s Old Town is genuinely one of the most beautiful medieval cityscapes in Europe, and I had always known this and always slightly failed to feel it properly, because knowing something and feeling it are different things, and in a crowd of several thousand people all also knowing it, the feeling gets a bit diluted.

With almost nobody there, the architecture could just be itself. The Town Hall’s Gothic spire was sharper. The limestone walls of the buildings along Pikk Street were more legible — you could see the different periods of construction, the patching and rebuilding over centuries, without the interference of a queue for a café or a tour group being photographed in front of the guild hall. Walking up Pikk jalg to Toompea, I could hear my own footsteps echo off the walls of the passage. It sounded exactly like what it was: a stone lane that had channelled people uphill for seven hundred years.

I’ve read since about how archaeologists sometimes discover things in quieter periods that crowds had always obscured. I understand that differently now. I noticed things in May 2020 that I’d walked past multiple times before: a carved stone face above a doorway on Müürivahe. A date, 1688, set into the wall of a building near the Dominican monastery. The fact that the Toompea viewing platform at Kohtuotsa looks not just over the red rooftops but out toward the sea, which on a clear day is a thin silver line at the horizon.

The places that were open

Not everything was closed. Enough was open to live in the city for a week. A bakery on Pikk, a few cafés, a small supermarket near the town walls. One restaurant in Kalamaja with tables set up outside in the cautious spring sunshine — I ate there three evenings and had the terrace essentially to myself, which would have been impossible in any normal summer.

Kalamaja was the neighbourhood that felt most unchanged. Its wooden houses didn’t care about the absence of tourists — they’d had their years of being overlooked before the neighbourhood became fashionable, and they wore the quiet comfortably. Telliskivi Creative City was almost entirely closed, but the space itself, the redbrick industrial buildings and the overgrown railway siding, was interesting empty in a different way than interesting full.

What I found myself thinking about

There is a version of Tallinn that exists in tourist infrastructure — the walking tours, the restaurants, the organised day trips — and a version that exists in the city itself, which is an ordinary Baltic city that happens to have an extraordinary medieval core and a population of approximately four hundred thousand people going about their lives. In a normal tourist season, the two versions overlap and it’s hard to see either clearly.

In May 2020, the tourist infrastructure layer had been stripped away, and what was underneath was very clear. A hardware shop on Vana-Posti. A pharmacy on Raekoja plats where locals went for their prescriptions. The organic sounds of the city: church bells, tram bells, the occasional burst of Estonian conversation in the street, which is a language that sounds like no other language, melodic and somehow ancient.

Estonia is a small country — 1.3 million people — and Tallinn is its city. The sense of it being a real place, not a tourist product, was never stronger than that quiet May.

On missing the tours

The things I missed were specific. The food tour through Balti Jaam market, which I’d done on a previous trip and which is the best single way to understand Estonian food culture in a few hours. The city walking tours that I’d come to appreciate not for showing me things I hadn’t found on my own but for providing the stories — the Hanseatic trading networks, the Swedish fortifications, the Soviet bureaucratic logic that still shapes parts of the city’s layout.

A guided Old Town walk earns its cost in context. Without it, you’re seeing things; with it, you’re reading them. In May 2020 I spent a lot of time seeing things without fully reading them, and the experience was beautiful but also slightly incomplete, like looking at a painting in a language you don’t speak.

What remained

The best discovery of that quiet week was how much of Tallinn didn’t need explaining. The viewpoints were the same. The walls were the same. The limestone faces of the buildings along Pikk were the same. The best viewpoints in Tallinn — Kohtuotsa and Patkuli on Toompea, the view from the base of St Olaf’s Church tower — still delivered.

I walked the full circuit of the old city walls on a Tuesday afternoon. The Kiek in de Kök tower and the Bastion Tunnels beneath Toompea were closed, but the walls themselves — the sections you can walk along at the northern end of the Old Town — were open and empty. An Estonian family, a mother and two children, passed me at the halfway point. The children were running ahead and occasionally stopping to look out through the arrow slits in the wall. One of them said something in Estonian that made the mother laugh.

That image stayed with me. A city that works without you, that doesn’t need your tourism to keep its children running on its walls.

The walks that define a quiet Tallinn

Without crowds and without pressure to optimise, a quiet May in Tallinn revealed three walks I’d either rushed through or skipped on previous visits.

The Toompea perimeter: Rather than heading straight up Pikk jalg to the viewing platforms, walking the perimeter of the Upper Town along its outer walls gives you a different relationship with the medieval city. The streets here — Komandandi tee, the lane behind the Dome Church — are narrow and quiet even in busy season, and in May they were entirely empty. The Dome Church (St Mary’s Cathedral) was closed but the churchyard was open, and standing in a Lutheran churchyard on a medieval Estonian hill in the silence of a May morning is a specific kind of experience.

The Kalamaja approach: Walking from the Old Town to Kalamaja via the coastal road rather than through Balti Jaam takes you past the edge of the Linnahall — the massive Soviet-era amphitheatre on the waterfront that is one of the most extraordinary architectural ruins in the Baltics, a brutalist monument to a regime that no longer exists, currently occupied only by gulls and the occasional urban explorer. You’re not supposed to enter (it’s technically fenced and closed), but the exterior and the views from the promenade alongside it are extraordinary.

The St Olaf’s loop: Starting at St Olaf’s Church on Pikk, walking down to the city walls at Fat Margaret tower, along Rannamäe tee by the walls, back up through the lower town to Raekoja plats. About forty-five minutes at a comfortable pace. The Fat Margaret tower, which houses part of the Estonian Maritime Museum’s smaller collection, was closed but the surrounding fortification — one of the most complete sections of the medieval wall — was visually powerful from outside.

These walks don’t require anything special to do them. They require no bookings, no entry fees, no tour operators. They require only a morning and the willingness to go slow, which a quieter city makes easier.

A note for future first-timers

The Old Town will be full again. The cruise ships dock four hundred thousand passengers a year in Tallinn, and most of them come through Viru Gate. The restaurant tables will fill up. The tours will queue outside the town hall. This is what the city needs economically, and the tourism is what funds the restoration of those limestone walls.

But if you visit in early spring, or in the quiet weeks after Christmas, or on a rainy Wednesday in October when the cruise ships haven’t docked — you’ll catch something of what I found that May. A medieval city that is also just a city, old and specific and entirely sure of itself.

The best time to visit Tallinn guide covers the shoulder seasons honestly. Go in spring or late autumn if you can. The walls are the same colour in the low light as they are in June, and there’s more room to hear your own footsteps on the cobblestones.