Atlantica - 01.06.2002, Page 47

A T L A N T I C A 45
“Old Town is like a movie set,” says American Steve Roman, as we
talk over coffee at Kolumbus Krisostomus, a funky cafe located near
the entrance of Old Town, Tallinn’s medieval walled city.
As a long-time resident and the editor of the guidebook Tallinn In
Your Pocket, Roman is the perfect resource on the city’s must-see
spots; he appears to know just about every medieval stone and peb-
ble in Old Town.
At the moment, the expat’s metaphor seems appropriate, because
as I look around this funky cafe at the rainbow-coloured shelves full
of yellow, green and orange tea cups and saucers, it feels as though
I’ve fallen down a hole and landed in Alice’s Wonderland. The Alice
in Wonderland motif is further enhanced by the fact that to enter the
cafe you must first cross a tiny bridge over an imagined stream.
Then there’s the spacy response I get from the waitress when I ask
for a menu.
“We don’t have menus,” she tells me with a mischievous smile.
“We don’t even have waitresses.”
Okey-dokie. Where’s that Cheshire Cat?
A tad discombobulated, I sit back down next to Steve who suggests
I look out the window at the castle towers and medieval walls rising
into the sky. The only thing missing from the windowed snapshot is
a knight and a princess.
“I call it the ‘Magic Kingdom’. Living and working inside of Old
Town is like being in Disneyland. Yet, it’s real.”
WHERE THE HECK IS TALLINN?
I imagine some of you have never heard of this magical kingdom.
Before departing to Tallinn, a friend asked me, “Where the heck is
that?”
The capital of Estonia is located on the eastern coast of the Baltic
Sea. Because of its size – only about 434,000 residents – and loca-
tion, Tallinn has remained a well-kept secret. But the cat is out of the
bag. A recent London edition of Time Out ranked Tallinn number
five on its list of ‘the 30 coolest destinations on the planet’. Last
year, Estonia shocked Europe by winning the schmaltzy Eurovision
song contest, and thanks to its victory the city hosted this year’s
competition, held last May at Saku Suurhall. While the song contest
is a relatively sappy event, roughly 300 million television viewers
tuned in to see that Tallinn was no longer bogged down by Eastern
European bureaucracy.
Tallinn does not feel like Eastern Europe. Having gained its inde-
Medieval
Madness
Globetrotting travellers looking for new adventures have
begun showing up in Tallinn.
Edward Weinman discovers why the capital of Estonia
is Europe’s newest hot spot.
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