JANEK MÄGGI: The Old Town Should Be Demolished – Only Rats Live There!

Why live or do business in a place visited only by professional tourists who have stuffed themselves to the gills aboard huge cruise ships, whose sole interest is to stretch their legs for a moment and breathe some fresh air, rather than buy heritage-poor junk with a little blue-black-and-white flag stuck on it?

If Amsterdam’s historic city centre, for example, is capable of relieving tourists of every last cent they have, Tallinn’s Old Town has nothing to offer even to visitors eager to part with their money. This city does not work. It is dead.

A normal Estonian avoids the Old Town because beer there costs about 10–12 times more than in Latvian border shops, and even when restaurants charge robbery-level prices, they still go bankrupt. The cobblestone streets are unsuitable for cycling, and there is no room for walking either in summer or winter.

In summer, movement is obstructed by tourist groups wandering around like headless chickens, with no real interest in what a guide speaking a language they barely understand is trying to explain to them. They simply take pictures of themselves, and occasionally of a travelling companion who is still capable of being excited about discovering yet another place they have never visited before.

In winter, the cobblestones are slippery. In December, you have to endure the Christmas market circus, with air thick from the smell of rancid fat – the same annual money-grabbing exercise aimed at people who, admittedly, are exactly the ones to take the money from.

The Number of Residents Has Fallen Ninefold

As early as the beginning of 1940, Eesti Päevaleht wrote that the Old Town should be demolished because only rats lived there and modern people did not want to live in such medieval conditions. The Germans who had left had abandoned a run-down city whose restoration seemed pointless. Estonians who became self-confident during the period of independence have always wanted central heating and hot water running from the tap.

Diligent Soviet architects also concluded that renovating old houses would require far too much effort. In 1962, a project was unveiled under which 80 per cent of the Old Town’s buildings would have been demolished. The plan was to replace the Old Town with office and government buildings of up to ten storeys and broad arterial roads.

Unfortunately, people with grand ideas were opposed by local heritage conservationists and architects, who always ruin everything, and in 1966 the Tallinn Old Town conservation area was created – the first of its kind anywhere in the Soviet Union.

And now we are stuck with the consequences: only about 2,000 residents remain in the Old Town, compared with nearly 17,000 at the beginning of the 1960s. After all, who wants to buy earplugs because of a few drunken people yelling at night?

The Old Town is still overrun by rats today. At the beginning of the Covid period, when the Old Town emptied almost overnight, I was slightly afraid that the hungry rats – suddenly deprived of food scraps from closed restaurants and rubbish bins – might eat me. One morning, they were climbing around the iron gate of the office then located on Uus Street. I spent quite a while wondering whether I should go through the gate, because I was convinced they would leap at my throat from hunger.

Poverty Is Needed to Make People Behave Sensibly

The positive programme for bringing people back into the city is, however, remarkably simple. Tallinn’s Old Town was not demolished in the 19th century like Riga’s, which is now rebuilding replicas of old demolished buildings – the House of the Black Heads, for example, is not the original but a reconstruction – because compared with the Latvians, Tallinn’s residents were poor and economically incapable.

If you have no money and do not know how to do business, then you have to live and work in the conditions life gives you. Nothing grand or exciting.

The Latvians got a world-class Art Nouveau city; we got a problem lasting for centuries, a place that nobody likes. Of course, if we still want to preserve the Old Town, we must remain poor. That is the only way.

The best preservative for heritage is lack of money, followed by lack of business, intellectual laziness and lack of ambition. We Estonians have all four. We have had them for the last two centuries.

Latvia and Lithuania were supposedly five or ten years behind us in the 1990s, but apparently the discussion was only about the year, not the century. By now the gap has stretched to several centuries: they live in an aromatic future, while we live in a stinking past.

We Should Start with Sõprus Cinema and the Writers’ House

The city government should think about how to rid itself of the problem called the “Old Town” as quickly as possible. It could take inspiration from Tartu, which is capable of building up its city centre densely – sparing neither trees nor other trivialities – with buildings that perhaps too many people will not visit in the future, such as Siuru, but at least builders have had work and the city government has created a monument to itself.

In the Old Town, the first step should be to turn into lawn the visually offensive, propagandistic and intellectually impoverished Soviet legacy. First, the sinful nightclub den known as Sõprus Cinema, which nobody visits anyway, should be demolished. Then the Writers’ House, built for the former friends of deporters and writers of red propaganda screeds, should go too. Juhan Smuul’s hideous bas-relief still hangs on it.

Enough is enough, because historically conscious people cannot even come to the Old Town for coffee because of those two buildings alone. And all the restaurants that are still left, including Pegasus, have to keep themselves alive by offering unprofitable lunch specials.

The government, meanwhile, should be advised to raise taxes. Surely it is possible to buy even more guns and ammunition, hire more officials and make the state stronger! There is always somewhere to put additional money; surely someone can think of something.

As a new tax, I would recommend a net wealth tax: each year, the state calculates your net assets – the market value of everything you own minus your debts – and takes 25 per cent of it. This would also help keep the rich busy, if not with actual work, then at least with hiding their assets.

Tax increases help make people poorer and business less worthwhile. Then people will be willing to move to the Old Town or at least go for walks there, even though it is so extraordinarily unpleasant, and entrepreneurs will stop trying to build magnificent casinos and hotels in the ancient city – places where nobody will bring their money, but whose beautiful façades offend even the dull eyes of inexperienced tourists amid the general greyness.