The seaside town of Sillamäe is a living memorial to the showpiece architecture of the late Stalinist period, its elegantly proportioned apartment blocks combining neo-Egyptian pilasters and scallop-shell lunettes with hammers, sickles and facade-topping, five-pointed stars.

The model town’s inhabitants were almost all employed in the local uranium mine, built by prison labour in 1948. The mine fed the USSR’s nuclear energy programme before being closed down by the Estonian government in 1991. The mine’s environmental legacy constitutes a considerable headache for the authorities, but neat-and-tidy Sillamäe itself is an enchanting urban relic and well worth a trip from Narva to see.

Tree-lined boulevards and manicured parks surround a set-piece main square, where a statue of a bare-torsoed miner juggles a confusion of hoops and balls – signifying, presumably, molecules orbiting the nucleus of an atom. The nearby House of Culture, a notable example of Stalinist-era architecture, flaunts the kinds of colonnades and pediments you’d expect to see on a Greco-Roman temple.

From the House of Culture, a mauve-and-turquoise staircase leads down to the stately apartment buildings of Mere pst, at the far end of which you’ll find a shingle seashore – the brown headland over to the west is where most of the mining took place.

Practical Info

Sillamäe lies 25km west of Narva and served by hourly buses.