Tallinn travel guide

Top 10 sights in Tallinn

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© Ivar Leidus · CC BY-SA 3.0 ee

   Toompea Castle

   A medieval castle on Toompea hill behind a pink baroque front of 1773, now the seat of the Estonian parliament. The Riigikogu chamber inside is a rare surviving interior in expressionist style, built in the 1920s in the courtyard of the castle.

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   2© Georg Mittenecker, perspektivisch entzerrt von User:Ikiwaner · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

   An Orthodox cathedral built between 1894 and 1900 in the Russian revival manner, sited deliberately on Toompea opposite the seat of local power as a statement of empire. Estonia debated demolishing it in the 1920s and eventually left it alone.

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   3© Ivar Leidus · CC BY-SA 3.0 ee

   St. Nicholas' Church

   A medieval church burnt out by Soviet bombing in March 1944 and rebuilt as a museum of church art. It holds the surviving fragment of Bernt Notke's Danse Macabre of about 1500 — death leading pope, emperor and merchant off in turn.

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   4© Olga Itenberg · CC BY 2.0

   St. Olaf's Church

   The tallest church in Estonia at 123.7 metres, and by tradition the tallest building in the world when its spire stood higher still in the 16th century. Named for the Norwegian king Olav Haraldsson, it serves a Baptist congregation; a platform at 60 metres opens over the old town.

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   5© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St. Mary's Cathedral

   A thirteenth-century Lutheran cathedral on Toompea hill — the oldest church in Tallinn and on the Estonian mainland. It was also the only building on Toompea to survive the great fire of the seventeenth century.

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   Kadriorg Palace

   A Petrine baroque palace built from 1718 for Peter the Great, who took Estonia from Sweden and wanted a summer residence on the Gulf of Finland. It now holds the foreign art collection, and the formal garden behind it has been restored.

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   7© Mait Metsur, aerofotod.ee · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Kumu

   The main art museum, opened in 2006 in a copper and limestone building cut into the side of a hill. Its Soviet-era floor is the interesting one: it shows the official painting and the unofficial work side by side and does not pretend the period away.

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   8© Metsavend · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Pikk Hermann

   The tower on the corner of Toompea castle, first built in the 1360s and raised to forty-five metres in the sixteenth century. The Estonian flag is hoisted on it at sunrise each day to the anthem, and lowered at sunset — during the Soviet years it flew the Soviet one.

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   9© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Freedom Square

   The square at the south end of the old town, closed at one corner by a glass cross of 2009 commemorating the War of Independence of 1918 to 1920. The monument was expensive, leaked and was mocked, and has since become simply part of the place.

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    10© Digger · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Tallinn TV Tower

    A tower of 1980, three hundred and fourteen metres high, built for the Olympic sailing regatta held in Tallinn. In August 1991 a handful of Estonian volunteers barricaded themselves inside it against Soviet paratroopers to keep the broadcasts running, and won.

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   1© ToBreatheAsOne · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Tallinn Song Festival Grounds

   An open-air stage built for the song festival, whose choir platform holds fifteen thousand singers. In September 1988 some three hundred thousand people — a quarter of the Estonian nation — gathered on this field to sing songs that had been banned, which is where the Singing Revolution gets its name.

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   2© Abrget47j · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Walls of Tallinn

   The medieval walls of the old town, of which about 1.9 kilometres and some twenty towers survive out of more than forty — one of the most complete circuits in northern Europe. Stretches of the wall walk are open, and the towers are variously museums, cafés and private flats.

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   3© VargaA · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Patarei prison

   A former coastal fortress and prison of about four hectares in the Kalamaja district on the shore of Tallinn Bay. It was built between 1830 and 1837 as a defence work of imperial Russia.

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   4© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Presidential Palace

   The residence of the president of Estonia, in Kadriorg Park in Tallinn. It is a baroque revival building, guarded by the Estonian Guard Battalion.

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   5© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kiek in de Kök

   An artillery tower of 1475, thirty-eight metres high with walls four metres thick, whose Low German name means peek into the kitchen — the gunners could see down the chimneys of the houses below. It now connects to the bastion tunnels dug beneath the town.

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   Fat Margaret

   A gun tower built between 1511 and 1530 beside the harbour gate, with walls up to five metres thick and a hundred and fifty-five embrasures. Its nickname is medieval; it now holds the Estonian maritime museum and a roof terrace.

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   Russalka Memorial

   A bronze monument raised at Kadriorg on 7 September 1902 for the ninth anniversary of the sinking of the Russian warship Rusalka on passage to Finland in 1893. Amandus Adamson made it, the first monument in Estonia by an Estonian sculptor.

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   8© Original uploader: et:Kasutaja:Boy (Estonian language wikipedia). · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Suur Tõll

   A steam icebreaker preserved at the Estonian Maritime Museum in Tallinn. She was built at the Vulcan yard in Stettin in 1914 for imperial Russia as the Tsar Mihail Fyodorovich, and was renamed Volynets after the Bolsheviks took her in 1917.

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   9© Hedwig Storch · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St. Peter's and St. Paul's Cathedral

   The Catholic cathedral of Tallinn, set back in a courtyard off Vene street in the old town. It was built in 1844 to Carlo Rossi's classical design on the site of a Dominican monastery, and remains the only Catholic church in the city.

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    Church of the Holy Spirit

    A medieval Lutheran church behind the town hall square whose clock of 1684 is the oldest in Tallinn. The first sermons in Estonian rather than German were preached here after the Reformation, which makes it the founding place of Estonian-language literacy.

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