Set astride the banks of the River Emajõgi, the tranquil, leafy city of Tartu is the undisputed intellectual centre of Estonia; home to a 370-year-old university that remains the most prestigious seat of learning in the Baltic States.

The academic world remains absolutely central to the character of what is Estonia’s second-largest city: one fifth of the population of 100,000 is reckoned to be made up of students and their teachers, while many of the city centre’s Neoclassical buildings date back to the university’s nineteenth-century heyday.

Tartu has long been considered the home of the nation’s educated elite, and ambitious Estonians still tend to choose to study here in preference to the capital. The city’s tangible sense of superiority over Tallinn is bolstered by the fact that it’s one of the most truly Estonian urban centres in the country – it was spared mass immigration from other parts of the Soviet Union and less than a quarter of today’s population count Russian as their first language.