Estonia

Tallinn

Medieval

Creative

Brutalist

St. Catherine's Passage ❘ Benkrut/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Palm House in Glehn Park ❘ Ilja Enger-Tsizikov/Alamy

Old Town with Alexander Nevsky Cathedral ❘ James Strachan/Getty Images

Soviet-era Olympics amphitheater ❘ Ana Flasker/Shutterstock

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Where medieval buildings and tunnels are now bursting with edgy art.

Art is everywhere in Tallinn. A medieval alley has been turned into a row of artisan workshops, and an 18th-century Baroque palace has transformed into a museum.

Just a ferry’s ride from Helsinki, Tallinn might just be the most underappreciated European capital. The city wears its various phases on its sleeve, from its agricultural history to its medieval urban core to its surrounding brutalist architecture.

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The “Old Town” sits at the heart of the city. There, the Aleksander Nevski Cathedral lords over a neighborhood of red-tiled roofs and Middle Ages architecture, where many of the original walls still stand. The surrounding cobblestone streets hide an underground maze of tunnels that were built as military shelter, before being turned into a storage space for the Art Museum of Estonia, and then later becoming a hiding and convening spot for Soviet-era punks outrunning the authorities. Today, the site is a museum dedicated both to the city’s history and contemporary art. Also nearby is a 14th-century prison that has been repurposed as a photography museum.

Memorial to the Victims of Communism ❘ James Talalay/Alamy

Clearly, art is everywhere in Tallinn. A medieval alley has been turned into a row of artisan workshops, and an 18th-century Baroque palace has transformed into an art museum. The city’s creativity takes many other forms as well, whether in the shape of a bar dedicated to Depeche Mode (with bonus pinball machines) or a series of concrete chambers, each designed to resonate with a different note. A 15-minute walk northwest of the Old City is the Telliskivi Creative City, a compound of shops, cafés, and galleries set in abandoned industrial buildings, now redesigned and repopulated by the city’s artists.

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For an interactive exhibit, the Estonian Open Air Museum showcases old rural barns and windmills from the country’s agricultural past alongside samplings of traditional food, such as rye bread, salted herring, and “mulgipuder”, a mash of potatoes and barley.

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Of course, any visit to Tallinn requires at least a few sauna stops. Though the tradition started in neighboring Finland, saunas in Estonia date back to the 13th century. There are a handful of public baths across the city, but the most striking are the igloo saunas along Tallinn Bay, where it’s common to take a cold dip after sweating in the capsule-like structures.