Europe

Tour guides have called it the most haunted place in Estonia. And you can wander around the empty halls and rooms of this vast abandoned structure entirely on your own. It was built as a sea fortress under the orders of Nicholas I of Russia (ca. 1828) to protect the sailing route to St. Petersburg, and finally completed in 1840. The vast sprawling structure covers an area of 4 hectares (10...

The Lennusadam Seaplane Harbour in Tallinn is home to one of the coolest museums I’ve visited anywhere in the world. The museum is housed in the old seaplane hangar, which was built 100 years ago on the order of Russian emperor Nicholas II, to become a part of the neighbouring naval fortress built by Peter the Great. It’s a massive, cavernous building, and was the first column-less thin shell...

Tallinn was the last town on our Baltic route, and the third in a UNESCO “old cities” triple crown, alongside Vilnius and Riga. The distinctive round towers with their orange cone-shaped roofs give Tallinn a character that sets it apart from the other two Baltic capitols. It’s a lot more polished, and very well restored. But it somehow lacks the gritty atmosphere of Riga, or the homespun charm of...

Never fear… If thermonuclear destruction rained down on Latvia, your fearless Communist civil leadership would survive. Or at least, that was the intention behind the massive Ligatne bunker, a 2,000 square metre secret facility whose existence was only declassified in 2003. I’m fascinated by Cold War sites, and I’d never pass up the opportunity to explore one. So we drove out there from Riga one...

The countryside of Latvia is filled with manor houses. In fact, there are over 1,000 of these historic homes still surviving today. To understand why, it’s necessary to take a quick snapshot of the region’s history. But don’t worry, I won’t clobber you with details… In the Middle Ages, the Baltic region formerly known as Livonia (today comprising parts of Latvia and Estonia) was made up of a...

Art Nouveau arrived on the scene as a reaction against 19th century Positivism, which saw animals — and humans — as mechanistic actors driven by natural laws, biology and evolution. It also rejected the “standard” conventions that art, at the time, was supposed to convey: notions of patriotism, glory or piety. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had more than my fill of last suppers, JC’s on the...

I’m not very fond of birthdays. I’m uncomfortable being the centre of attention, except for in print. It feels weird to see so many people wishing me well — I guess because I spent most of my younger years getting in trouble. And I see birthdays as a moment of sober reflection on time running out, rather than a celebration of the past. But that being said, I’ll absolutely use birthdays to my...

The Plokštinė base was a Soviet medium-range nuclear missile launch facility built in the early 1960’s. Four launch silos housing 22-metre tall R12 rockets with 3-metre warheads were connected by long underground passageways to a multi-level command centre buried deep beneath reinforced concrete. The base housed 10,000 soldiers, brought in secretly from USSR satellite states. And the 79th Rocket...

The Curonian Spit is a strange piece of geography… A short 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, the waves and winds of the Baltic Sea caused sand to accumulate in thin line in the shallow waters off Lithuania and the territory that would become the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. This thin strip of fragile dunes and pine forest eventually formed a lagoon, with just one narrow outlet to the sea at one end...