Viljandi
"I came for one afternoon and stayed three days, mostly because the lake kept changing colour and I wanted to see how many it could manage."
Viljandi is the Estonian town everyone in Tallinn tells you to visit and then can’t quite explain why. I went on the strength of a barista’s vague enthusiasm — “it’s, you know, soulful” — which is the kind of recommendation I have learned to either trust completely or ignore completely, with no middle ground. Lia and I took the slow train south through pine forest and flat farmland, two hours of the kind of green monotony that empties your head usefully, and arrived in a town of about seventeen thousand people arranged on a hill above a lake, with the air of a place that knows exactly what it is and feels no need to prove it to you.
Castle ruins and a Soviet-era bridge
The reason the town sits where it does is the castle — or rather what’s left of it, which is romantic chunks of red-pink stone wall standing on grassy ramparts above the lake. The Teutonic Knights built a serious fortress here in the thirteenth century; wars, sieges and a few centuries of neglect did the rest, and now it’s a public park where teenagers eat ice cream on the ruins and dogs are walked among the foundations of a vanished great hall.
The detail I loved most is a slender red suspension footbridge slung across a ravine in the castle park, donated in 1931 and reportedly relocated from a manor estate. It bounces gently when you walk across it, in a way that no modern safety committee would now permit, and from the middle of it the whole lake opens out below — long, narrow, blue, gouged by a glacier and left to fill with cold clean water. We stood there long enough that a local woman stopped to tell us, unprompted, that it was the best view in Estonia. I am in no position to verify the claim but I did not argue.
The folk music festival
Once a year, over four days in late July, Viljandi holds the Folk Music Festival — Viljandi Pärimusmuusika Festival — and the town’s population multiplies as something close to the entire Estonian folk scene descends on it. We were not there for the festival, which I half regret and half don’t, because everyone we met spoke about it with the slightly evangelical glow of people describing a religious experience. Stages fill the castle ruins. Bagpipes and the kannel — a kind of Estonian zither — drift across the lake at midnight. The whole hill, by all accounts, hums.
Even out of season, you feel the town is built around music and craft. There’s a culture academy here, and you trip over instrument makers, weavers and ceramicists in the old wooden quarter. We bought a small woven runner from a woman who made it herself and who, when I asked if business was good, gave the magnificently Estonian answer: “It is enough.”
When to go and how
Late July for the folk festival, if you can get accommodation — book absurdly far ahead. Otherwise, summer for swimming and rowing on the lake, and the long pale evenings. Viljandi is an easy train or bus ride from Tallinn or Tartu and makes a perfect slow day or overnight. Walk the castle ramparts at dusk, cross the bouncing bridge at least twice, and eat at one of the lakeside cafés where the menu is short and the rye bread is dark and serious.