This week’s travel dream: Reliving a nation’s musical salvation

Estonia is an ancient country, united by song, said David Patrick Stearns in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Once a playground for Russian aristocracy—Peter the Great’s summer palace still stands in pristine condition in the capital city—this small country on the Baltic Sea was ravaged during World War II. The Soviet occupation created new refugees, further emptying the land. But Estonia, long a breeding ground for composers, conductors, and singers, gained its independence due to what’s called the “singing revolution.” In the late 1980s, a movement sprang up when demonstrators began singing native songs forbidden by the Soviets, while punk-rock groups staged guerrilla concerts before fleeing into underground tunnels.

Today, a popular tour visits those tunnels, and a quarter of the population competes in amateur singing festivals. The capital, Tallinn, is a picturesque beach town where CD stores seem to stock more avant-garde music than anything popular elsewhere in Europe. But Estonia isn’t all music. Tartu, which dates back to 1030, is the country’s oldest city and “initially resembles some quiet Canadian suburb”—until you encounter the town square and its “heart-stopping, neoclassical architecture” in “a color scheme suggesting Caribbean pastels.” The seaside resort town Haapsalu, meanwhile, feels like a “Victorian time-travel experience.” Tchaikovsky favored the healing mud treatments here. Today, crowds are regularly entertained by jazz concerts at the medieval Haapsalu Castle.

One of the major cultural events of the year is the Nargen Festival, a series of folk, jazz, and classical concerts based in a church built by fishermen on an island near Tallinn. Last year, following the festival’s main event, held at a former ammunition factory, I walked back to town up a gravel service road, accompanied by a crowd wearing high heels and evening clothes. To my right, I noticed a structure “as long as two football fields” that was “majestically crumbling,” its roof and walls giving out. Russian warships, I learned, were once made in the building, which dates back to czarist times. Trees and other foliage were now growing there instead.

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At the Hotel St. Barbara in Tallinn (stbarbara.ee), doubles start at $140.