There aren’t many national capitals that can be visited from another national capital as an easy day trip in the way Tallinn can be from Helsinki. Then again, few capitals derive their names, as Tallinn does, from that of another country. "Tallinn" derives from the Estonian words Daani linn, which mean "Danish town." While Tallinn can’t match Riga’s role as a cosmopolitan business center or Vilnius’s historic importance to speakers of Lithuanian, Polish, and Yiddish alike, Toompea alone contains enough multinational quirks to keep you amused, or at least occupied, for an afternoon’s sightseeing.
Tallinn’s name may be Danish, but Denmark’s flag is in a sense Estonian, both owing to the same battle on June 15, 1219, in which the Danes took Tallinn (or more accurately, the wooden castle the Estonians had built on Toompea). According to legend, the Estonians had routed the Danes, who were commanded by King Valdemar II, when suddenly a red banner divided into four equal quadrants miraculously dropped from the sky. The Danish bishop Anders Sunesen, present because Danish wars of conquest had papal approval as a Crusade to Christianize the pagan Estonians, regarded the fortuitous flag as a divine sign and raised the flag above the troops.
The newly inspired Danes subsequently won the battle, which is to this day celebrated in Denmark as "Valdemar’s Day", the king having also earned the epithet "The Victorious." It seems churlish to point out that this tale, told with equal gusto in Copenhagen and Tallinn alike, is completely fictitious. Nonetheless, it falls upon me to do so, although the subsidiary claim that Dannebrog (literally "red cloth") is considered the world’s oldest national flag (and one of the few to actually be named) is generally regarded as accurate.
Moving from one occupying power to another, it should come as little surprise that Russia sought to assert its power architecturally as well as politically during its lengthy period ruling Estonia (1710-1919). The onion domes of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, designed by Mikhail Preobrazhensky, in 1894 and completed in 1900, were part of a concerted program of Russification around the Empire’s Baltic provinces. Helsinki, Riga, and Vilnius all have rather prominent Orthodox places of worship. For all its impressive interior and exterior, however, the Cathedral sits on shaky ground—legend has it that this owes to its placement above the grave of the Estonian hero Kalevipoeg!
One hero, the location of whose grave on Toompea is not in doubt, however, is Admiral Sir Samuel Greig (1735-1788). As his name suggests, he was a Scot who first distinguished himself in the British navy during the Seven Year’s War (1756-1763) and subsequently took up Catherine the Great’s invitation to oversee the overhauling of Russia’s fleet, which had deteriorated since the reign of Peter the Great. He proved so successful at his task, and in defeating the Turkish fleet in the Mediterranean and the Swedes in the Baltics, that Catherine heaped honors on him, including a knighthood and an admiral’s commission. After defeating the Swedes, however, he died of a severe fever and consequently was given a Protestant burial in Toomkirik, where his body remains to this day.