The baptistery window
Where the White Lady appears each August.
Sander Säde at English Wikipedia — CC BY 3.0 · Emil Eikner for the Southerly Clubs — Public domain · Ireen Trummer — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Ireen Trummer — CC BY-SA 4.0
For anyone who likes small towns and timber houses, yes: castle, station and seafront make a pleasant half day. For a short stay in Estonia, Tartu or Lahemaa come first.
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A bishops' castle on the west coast with a white-lady legend: the bishops of Ösel-Wiek built it in the thirteenth century as their seat, ringed by eight hundred metres of wall and containing a cathedral that is the largest single-nave church in the Baltic states. Its legend outruns its history: a nun is said to have been smuggled in disguised as a boy, discovered, and walled up alive — and the White Lady appears in the baptistery window on every full-moon night in August. The town holds an annual festival for her, and people gather to wait for the shadow to appear on the glass (it is in truth a reflection of moonlight — but nobody wants to know). Haapsalu itself is a historic spa town: the mud baths Russian tsars came to from the nineteenth century, a wooden railway station with a two-hundred-metre canopy built to receive the tsar, and streets of timber houses. Ninety minutes west of Tallinn.
Where the White Lady appears each August.
Sought by the tsars from the nineteenth century.
Lossiplats 3, Haapsalu