Aegna

Aegna, the car-free island off Tallinn, spent much of the twentieth century sealed off, first by Soviet marines and then by a lingering ban that kept islanders from their own beaches into the 1960s. The guide traces the fishing families who worked this shore before Tsarist Russia poured money into a fortress and gun battery here, expanded further by independent Estonia in the 1920s. Stand on the old battery wall and picture the water traffic it once watched for.