Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Narva


Narva is located in the extreme northwest of Estonia, across the Narva river from Russia.  It was bombed heavily in the 2nd World War so little of the original old city remains.    The Soviets built many ugly apartments and the area is economically repressed so less of them have been fixed up than in the other cities.

The majority of the citizens are of Russian, not Estonian, heritage and 95% are Russian speaking.  So it's defiantly a different atmosphere.  Narva gets a bad rap from the guidebooks and from other tourists we met.  Certainly it was harder to find English speakers.

But we didn't find Narva so bad.  

We started out at the beach resort of Narva-Jöesuu, formerly a popular beach resort with the Tsars and the Soviets.  It hasn't really been resurrected since liberation, so there's a lot of derelict buildings and overgrown lots with a few big spa hotels along the beach.  

Derelict former Tsarist pleasure palace.  The photos in the windows are a nice touch.

The beach is beautiful though.

It was a bit busier than it looks here.  People were sunbathing but no swimmers.  Too cold!


We stayed in a former manor farm, Vana-Olgina-Mois.  There were no other campers, but it turned out there were quite a few construction workers staying in the cabins and the hostel; in the evenings the dump trucks and vans would show up and they'd all pile out.



No comments:

Post a Comment