Wander & Wonder Travel Newsletter

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Some cities welcome you with a cathedral.

Others with a beach.

And then there’s a city like Tartu, which welcomes you with a fountain of two students kissing under an umbrella.

Tartu is Estonia's oldest city, and roughly one in five of the 100,000 people living there are students.

That mix gives the place a very particular energy: 400 years of serious academia on one side, backyard parties and street art on the other.

And in August it gets even better.

From 8-15 August, the Town Hall Square turns into the biggest open-air cinema in the Baltics for the love film festival Tartuff - six classic films on a giant screen under the late summer sky, all completely free.

So bring a blanket, and stay for the rest of the city.

Read on to learn about:

🛬 The museum built on a Soviet runway

🔒 The attic prison for badly behaved students

🥣 The neighbourhood called Soup Town

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Destination of the Week

Tartu is small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes, and layered enough to keep surprising you for days.

Start at Town Hall Square, where the Kissing Students fountain has become the city's unofficial logo - and where a genuinely crooked 18th-century building leans over the corner like it has had one beer too many.

Then climb Toomemägi, the green hill above the town, where you will find the ruins of a 13th-century cathedral and two bridges: the Angel's Bridge and the Devil's Bridge.

Local tradition says that if you cross the Angel's Bridge holding your breath, your wish comes true.

Don't Miss

Just outside the city centre, the Estonian National Museum does something no other museum in Europe does: it begins on a Soviet runway.

The 350-metre-long building rises straight out of the tarmac of the old Raadi airbase, where Soviet bombers once stood on the largest runway in the Baltics.

Back then, Tartu was a closed military city. Visitors were not welcome, and the airfield was aimed squarely at the West.

The architects turned all of that around: the museum extends the runway - and then lifts off.

Inside is Estonia's largest museum, running from Iron Age tools to Soviet kitchens in one long, luminous sweep.

Did You Know?

Hidden in the attic of the University of Tartu's main building is a small room with a very specific purpose.

It was the student prison.

From 1802, students who offended public morality or the university's code of conduct were locked up here by the university's own court.

The tariff was strict:

- 2 days for an overdue library book

- 5 days for insulting the cloakroom attendant

- 3 weeks for duelling

Bored, locked in and extremely well educated, the inmates covered the walls with drawings, verses and jokes.

The original 19th-century graffiti is still there today - and you can go up and read it.

The Trendy Traveler Tip

Ten minutes north of the Old Town lies a neighbourhood called Supilinn - "Soup Town".

And the name is not a metaphor.

The streets here are called Potato, Pea, Bean, Berry and Melon, after the vegetable gardens that once fed this working-class corner by the river.

It was one of the longest-surviving poor districts in Europe, and then it became a cheap hideout for students and artists in the 1990s.

Today it is wooden cottages, fruit trees, hand-painted murals and gardens spilling onto the pavement.

It is the best summer walk in Tartu - and you will have it almost to yourself.