Hellemann Tower and Town Wall Walkway

This guide to Hellemann Tower and its town wall walkway in Tallinn opens with an odd puzzle: why the city's tallest watchtower, raised in the late fourteen hundreds, was named after an ordinary shopkeeper, Helle Holleman, instead of a bishop or a duke. It walks the nearly two-hundred-metre wooden walkway strung between towers, part of a defensive ring that by the thirteen fifties carried close to thirty towers over the rooftops, and explains why every Tallinn citizen, by law, had to take a turn on guard duty in their own armor. You'll meet the brewers, wool merchants and shopkeepers who traded a night's sleep for a shift on these same planks. Look out from the walkway toward the spires of the old town hall and cathedrals below.