Maarjamäe Castle

This guide to Maarjamae Castle in Tallinn opens on Sugar Hill, where eleven stone buildings from an 1811 refinery and starch factory burned in a fire in March 1869, leaving only a wall, an ice cellar and a scatter of sheds. It follows Russian aristocrat Count Anatoli Orlov-Davydov, who bought the scorched plot in 1873 and raised a neo-Gothic summer palace out of the ruins, naming it Marienberg after his wife Maria rather than clearing the wreckage away. You'll hear how the surviving limestone wall and vaulted cellar were folded into the new estate, and how even the year the palace rose is disputed in the record. Look for that older stone where it meets the newer walls.