A Treasure By the Baltic Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, combines new and old By Stryker McGuire NEWSWEEK May 13 issue — Tallinn—where’s that? you figure you probably don’t want to go there. Think again. The capital of Estonia, a former corner of the Soviet Union on the Baltic Sea, still qualifies as undiscovered. But it’s beginning to get good notices. The London edition of Time Out ranks Tallinn No. 5 on its list of 30 “coolest destinations on the planet.”

Newsweek THAT’S BECAUSE Tallinn mixes old and new in such a pleasing way. Part of the city’s appeal comes from Old Town, a well-preserved medieval walled city whose cobbled streets and merchants’ houses climb Toompea Hill. Tallinn stagnated under five decades of Soviet rule, but when independence came in 1991, the city burst forth to catch up with the West. Old Town today lives alongside Tallinn’s modern other half, a tech-savvy enclave not unlike the Nordic capitals across the Baltic. Alongside that are the old summer palaces of the tsars, and such eerie vestiges of the U.S.S.R. as grim apartment blocks in the suburbs. The good news is, none of Tallinn’s history has a theme-park feel to it. “The infrastructure has improved, but they haven’t overpackaged the product,” says Michael Tarm, editor of Tallinn’s City Paper. The new side of Tallinn is thoroughly post-Soviet. Two years ago the Estonian government became the first in the world to go “paperless”; it conducts much of its business online. On Tallinn streets, the equivalent of London’s bright-red phone booth is the ubiquitous @ sign directing people to the nearest public Net connection. A boom in IT businesses, coupled with a quadrupling of foreign visitors in the last six years, has pumped money into bars and restaurants.

The homegrown supermodel Carmen Kass—she’s on several Vogue covers this month around the world—added a touch of glamour to Tallinn when she returned last year to start her own modeling agency. As a child, she lent her voice to the “Singing Revolution,” which culminated in 1991 when 100,000 Estonians gathered in a park to celebrate the end of Soviet rule. If she’s smart, she won’t be in town in a few weeks when a different kind of singing revolution arrives. The Eurovision Song Contest, an annual high-camp exercise, is expected to draw a European TV audience of 100 million. May 25 may be the day the “new” Tallinn is discovered. Better get there soon.

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