Viru Gate

This guide to Viru Gate in Tallinn moves between two watchers separated by centuries: the Hanseatic guards who kept the horseshoe of stone walls raised in 1446, and the KGB technicians who wired the Viru Hotel's restaurant tables and ashtrays behind these towers decades later. You'll hear how the hotel presented itself as an ordinary Soviet establishment for foreigners, complete with an elevator that officially stopped one floor short of the truth. It traces the gate itself through six centuries of merchants, horse trams and a demolished gatehouse, down to the two round towers still standing here. Walk through slowly, you're crossing ground that traders and spies both once treated as neutral territory.