City Overview
Tallinn boasts the kind of stunning chocolate box old town that Disney executives can only dream of. Its old core is an almost impossibly pretty, all cobbles, castles and church spires with an eye-catching smorgasbord of medieval and baroque architecture. Estonia’s capital city, tucked right up at the north-eastern extremity of Europe on the shores of the Baltic Sea, has been hailed as the ‘New Prague’ and justifiably so, though it is more compact and easier to get around. Until 1991 Tallinn was clamped under the confines of Soviet rule, but since it broke free in a bloodless revolution, it has made up for five decades of lost independence by switching seamlessly from communism to capitalism. Marx is out and mobile phones are in with the city so switched on (with one of the highest mobile phone ownership rates in the world and Internet cafes and wi-fi hot spots springing up all over Tallinn) that the locals like to call their increasingly high-tech country E-stonia. On the fringes of the old core, a new district is emerging with gleaming new hotels and offices as Estonia celebrates the EU membership it attained in 2004. Anyone arriving in Tallinn with anachronistic images of what an old Soviet Bloc city should look like will be as surprised by this new skyline as they will be by the charming old core. Half the fun in Tallinn is just ambling around the old town streets drifting back through the layers of history that emerge at every turn with Russian orthodox churches and Dominican monasteries sharing the streets with old merchant houses and medieval meeting halls. Culture vultures will also find plenty to detain them in Tallinn, a city where art and culture are taken with a seriousness that is the polar opposite of the fun filled and unpretentiously raucous local nightlife scene.
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