Old Tallinn Walking Tour

Meeting by the ship

Meeting by the ship. The start time of the tour is given approximately and will be adjusted depending on your ship arrival time. The exact meeting time will be specified on your confirmation letter.

Fat Margaret and the town wall

Your guide meets you outside the port gate and walks you to the old town, which begins at Fat Margaret, the artillery tower of 1531 whose walls are almost five metres thick and which now holds the Estonian Maritime Museum.

Pikk street

The old trade road through the town, lined with the houses of the merchants who grew rich on the Hanseatic League. You pass the Three Sisters, three 15th-century houses joined into one facade, St Olaf's Church, whose spire made it one of the tallest buildings in Europe around 1500, and the guild houses, including the Great Guild of 1410 and the House of the Blackheads, the brotherhood of unmarried merchants who defended the town.

Marzipan Museum Room

A stop at the marzipan room. Tallinn claims marzipan was invented in its town pharmacy as a medicine, and the hand-painted figures have been made here since the 19th century.

Toompea and Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

A walk up to Toompea, the limestone hill the Danes fortified in 1219 and the seat of every power that has ruled Estonia since. The castle keeps its medieval towers, among them Tall Hermann, where the national flag is raised at sunrise; the pink baroque wing facing the square houses the Riigikogu, the Estonian parliament. Across from it stands Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, finished in 1900 in a late-19th-century revival style with five onion domes and eleven bells.

Dome Church

The Dome Church, the oldest church in mainland Estonia, founded in the 13th century and rebuilt many times, with a baroque spire added in 1779. Inside, the walls carry the coats of arms of the Baltic German nobility and the tombs of admirals and governors.

Viewing platforms

The viewing platforms on the edge of Toompea, where the whole lower town lies below: red-tiled roofs, church spires, the ring of medieval wall towers and the ferries crossing to Helsinki behind them.

Lower Old Town

The descent to the lower town, which merchants rather than nobles built. You see Gothic merchant houses with their hoisting beams still in place, the town wall with the towers that survive from a ring of forty-six, and two great churches: St Nicholas, gutted by Soviet bombing in March 1944 and now a museum holding Bernt Notke's Danse Macabre, and the Holy Spirit Church, whose painted clock of 1684 is the oldest in the city.

Town Hall Square

Town Hall Square, the heart of the town for eight centuries. The Town Hall, completed in 1404, is the only Gothic town hall left standing in northern Europe, and the weathervane of Old Thomas has turned on its spire since 1530. On the corner of the square, the Town Hall Pharmacy was already trading in 1422 and is among the oldest pharmacies in Europe still in business.

St Catherine's Passage and Viru Gate

St Catherine's Passage, a narrow lane running along the wall of the former Dominican monastery, where craftspeople keep open workshops for glass, felt, quilting, ceramics and jewellery. The walk ends at the Viru Gate, whose two ivy-covered towers of the 14th century are the postcard entrance to the old town.