Discovering the Tallinn Markets

When we arrived in Estonia on holiday, Cliff and I first focused on exploring all the touristy spots and trying out all the restaurants. I had been in Estonia for few weeks before began to wonder where the market might be. A quick search on the web told me that there were three markets, turg in Estonian, but the reviews were all over the place and the few locational refences made it clear that the people reviewing in English didn’t have the faintest idea which market was which, let alone what makes a five-star market.

For example, the market with by far the best reviews was Sadama Turg. It’s not a market. Sadama Turg is large shop at the harbour next to the ferry terminal. Fully half of the building is taken up by alcohol and most of the other shelves are filled with snack food. I discovered that the Finns come to Tallinn by ferry to buy cheap alcohol, because the tax is much lower here. Estonians buy their booze in Latvia for the same reason. No one seems to know where the Latvians go.

There’s nothing wrong with shopping at Sadama Turg and they offer a wide range of spirits with prices that are legitimately better than any other tourist trap in Tallinn. Bizarrely, it is probably the most reliable shop in town for finding duck eggs. Nevertheless, it is not a market.

Balti Jaama Turg, the market at the Baltic station, was a construction site. This was 2017 and the covered market was undergoing a massive multi-year renovation. They had offered some sort of space for the vendors in the disused train depot around the corner; however, it was all a bit haphazard.

Makeshift metal stalls stood on icy asphalt selling winter clothes and long underwear and, for reasons I never quite understood, feather boas. The brick lined depot had been turned into three aisles of tacky synthetic t-shirts and dresses with price tags that belied their sweatshop origins. Packed into the far end was the produce market: a small hall filled with warmly dressed stern-faced greengrocers with the broad shoulders of peasant stock sitting on plastic stools behind buckets of marinated cucumbers, with apples and cabbages piled high on the ground. There were no prices and no customers and no one seemed happy to see us.

Every Estonian I’d met in Tallinn spoke fluent English (and Russian and Finnish and even, at the monthly science fiction club meeting, fluent Elvish). However, at the market I found my friendly English-language greetings were met with blank looks or a muttered something, probably a swear word, which Cliff quickly identified as Russian. The markets in Tallinn, with the exception of the upmarket Harbour market, are run and staffed by Russians who have limited Estonian and even less English. We were able to purchase vegetables here but it was a dull and dreary place.

Keskturg (literally Central Market) seemed like my best bet. I expected Tallinn’s central market to be very commercial, probably supplying the many restaurants in the area, and so I went there last, not sure if I would be able to buy in small quantities. I arrived to discover a ramshackle affair of corrugated tin shacks with plastic bags draped over the doors to keep the cold out and two or three card tables set up with bruised fruit on special. A woman shouted at me in Russian. When I didn’t react, she called out “come look” in English. I paused and peeked through the doorway to see a single crate of dusty onions.

A tractor loaded with potatoes drove past me. I appeared to have discovered the back entrance; most of the dusty shacks served as storage with only a small selection of sheds selling discounted goods from their darkened interiors. Continuing past a large tiled building, I found an outdoor market, straight out of the Soviet era, of wooden tables under a large roof which did nothing to block the cold wind billowing through, miniature snow drifts collecting on the wooden legs.

Harsh faced women walked from stall to stall, glaring at the goods as if they could will them to become something better. The covered area was empty other than a scattered few old women wearing thick coats and fur hats with a selection of pickled vegetables and dried herbs on the tables in front of them. Around the other side, a large woman stood next to half a dozen tubs of sauerkraut, the only vendor who actually had customers, alongside three or four tables filled with fresh fruit and vegetables. Beyond them was what looked like a garage sale: the wooden tables filled with washed-out paperback books (all in Russian), faded shoes and cardboard boxes filled with old fashioned dinnerware, each plate a different pattern.

I didn’t buy anything at all my first visit or on my second visit, even after the snow had melted, even after I discovered the modern refrigerated counters in the tiled building, selling cheese and dairy on the ground floor and meat in the basement.

It wasn’t until I had walked all that way for a third time that I bullied myself into pointing at some goods and trying to buy them.

There wasn’t anything I needed. There probably wasn’t anything that I couldn’t buy more easily at the supermarket around the corner. But I couldn’t leave a third time without having at least tried.

The vendors all looked equally fed up and tired. I chose a large man with dusty hands and a box full of onions and pointed hopefully. He wrote a number on a piece of paper and showed it to me. 10. That could only be cents. I smiled brightly and gave him ten cents. He gave me a large onion. I hadn’t thought to bring a bag, so I put it into my handbag and smiled again at him. He didn’t smile back.

A few days later, I went back having learned the Estonian word for onion: sibol. I walked up to a woman who looked slightly less ill-tempered than the rest and pointed at the onion and said kilo. She got a bag and weighed a kilo full of onions and held up a single finger. I gave her a euro and took my kilo of onions home. Success. I was now a market shopper.

Then I became overconfident. The next time, a dark-haired woman smiled at me and said hello, the first actual friendly interaction I had encountered. I peered at the plastic barrel next to her table. Bright green cucumbers floated in salty brine with cloves of garlic and long-fingered sprigs of dill. This was a new challenge: I didn’t want just one but neither did I want a kilo. I pointed at the barrel and held up four fingers, hoping desperately I wouldn’t end up with four kilos of pickled cucumbers. She smiled happily and fished one out with a pair of tongs.

“One,” she said in English, and dropped it into a plastic bag. Flush with relief, I smiled and nodded.

She fished out another and thought for a moment. “One,” she said, and then again, “one.” Her smile was triumphant as she picked up the last cucumber. “One!”

I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t count to four.

As I went to pay, I saw a basket of knobbly roots, almost but not quite like wrinkled parsnips. I leaned closer. Was that horseradish? It looked paler than I was used to and thinner. But it could be. How to ask?

I pointed at the root and mimed taking a bite and then breathing out in horror, waving my hand in front of my mouth.

“Da,” she said, suddenly switching to Russian just in case I wasn’t already confused enough. “Da!” She mimed grating it and I nodded. She then picked up a jar of what surely had to be grated horseradish, offering it to me.

No. I shook my head, wondering if I dared a nyet. She frowned and pointed at the root and then at the jar. The look on her face was clear: Here, I’ve prepared it all for you, you should buy this.

Pointing at the root again, I said “one”, the only word that I knew she knew. It’d been years since I’d seen fresh horseradish and I was already dreaming of grating it up with some vinegar and cream for a super-strong homemade sauce. I wondered where I could buy steak or maybe even a joint of beef for roasting.

The woman had a small calculator. She typed 3.6 and pointed at the horseradish root: three euros and sixty cents. I nodded. She smiled and pointed at my bag of salted cucumber and added four euros before showing me the total. As I handed over a ten euro note, I thought, actually, no. It was clearly too much. Horseradish root can be stupidly expensive in speciality markets, it was true. But here in Estonia, horseradish seemed to be almost a staple and the most expensive thing I’d bought so far only cost a Euro. I couldn’t believe that one spindly root of a few hundred grams could cost so much. And four euros for four small cucumbers? It didn’t add up.

She made a big show of counting out my change exactly, Two euros and a handful of copper coins, smiling broadly at me. “OK?”

It wasn’t OK. I had been drawn to her smile but now I longed for the man with the dusty fingers. Still, there wasn’t much I could say, not now that I’d already paid, with a vocabulary that consisted of one and sibol and OK. If she thought I was a soft touch, well, I’d already confirmed it.

“OK,” I said but I made my displeasure known by stomping way with a scowl, no more smiles for anyone. As I stomped out of the covered area, I slipped and fell on the icy pavement. No one moved to help.

I picked myself up and stomped much more carefully back to our apartment. It was only when I arrived home that I realised that we didn’t even own a grater.