Hirvepark

This guide to Hirvepark in Tallinn starts with a strange, uncommented-on scene from the 1930s, deer wandering the hollow below Toompea castle hill while the city simply let them be, and asks why nobody found it odd. It reaches back to a legend of a Danish king named Valdemar, a deer he wanted as a pet, and a chase across the hilltop that ended at the edge of a cliff, a story historians tie to one of Tallinn's oldest recorded names. The guide follows how a moat turned botanical garden came to be named for an animal nobody here could quite let go of. Listen near the bastion wall, where the hollow still sits cupped below the old fortifications.