🇪🇪 Estonia
Tallinn
Tallinn is the capital and largest city of Estonia (population 450,000 city, 600,000 greater Tallinn), on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland — a city with the best-preserved medieval old town in Northern Europe (UNESCO World Heritage 1997) and simultaneously the world's most digitally advanced nation-state. The two identities are defining and complementary: the Tallinn Old Town (Vanalinn) is an almost completely intact 13th-15th century Hanseatic merchant city, with the limestone town walls (1.9 km surviving of the original 2.4 km), 28 of the original 46 towers, the Town Hall Square (the medieval commercial heart with the 15th-century Town Hall — the only surviving intact Gothic town hall in Northern Europe), the Dominican Monastery (1246), the Great Guild Hall (1410) and the Church of the Holy Spirit (1360); the medieval fabric has been so well preserved through Soviet-era neglect (the Soviets had no money to modernise the old town and its disuse as a commercial centre meant no destructive development pressure) that it is now the most intact medieval city centre in any European Union member state. The digital Estonia side: after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonia built its state from scratch and chose to build it digitally; by 2024, Estonia has the most advanced digital government in the world: 99% of all government services are available online (only marriage, divorce and property transfer require physical presence); the national digital identity card (the X-Road data exchange layer); the e-Residency programme (any person in the world can obtain a digital Estonian identity and run an EU-registered company online without physically visiting Estonia); the concept of the "digital republic" was developed by Toomas Hendrik Ilves (Estonian President 2006-2016) and the Skype founders (Skype was founded in Tallinn in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis working with the Estonian engineers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn).