Cafe Maiasmokk
Estonia's oldest running cafe, with a marzipan room of animal figures pressed from century-old stone molds.
This guide to Cafe Maiasmokk in Tallinn opens with Arent Passer, the Dutch sculptor who carved stone molds shaped like the city's heraldic lions in the sixteen hundreds, so confectioners could press the coat of arms into marzipan. You'll hear how that almond paste traveled the Hanseatic trade routes into a city too far north to grow almonds itself, and the legend of the apprentice pharmacist who supposedly invented it by accident in fourteen twenty-two. It follows the sweet into an eighteen sixty-four confectionery on Pikk Street, through a Soviet nationalization that shipped its recipes away, and back home decades later.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.