Brussels/Tallinn - Being attacked is never pleasant, but it's far worse when it happens somewhere you feel at home.

I thought I knew Tallinn. In four years in the Baltics, I'd written about it, photographed it, lectured on it, shown friends round it.

The morning after Russian rioters tore through the town in protest at the relocation of a Soviet-era war memorial known as the Bronze Soldier, it wasn't the city I knew any more.

The fear and shock were palpable. The Tallinn I knew had been a laid-back city, a place you could happily walk through in the dark, but now everyone was afraid.

"Don't go into town tonight," my taxi driver warned me on the drive in from the airport past bus-loads of police.

"Please do not go into the city centre tonight," an imposing sign in the hotel reception read.

"Please - just be careful," the receptionist implored me.

That afternoon I walked down streets I knew, but the cobbles were awash in a sea of broken glass. Shops had been smashed open and looted, bus shelters ripped up, buildings were scarred with fire, and everywhere the riot police were standing in clusters, staring at us.

All day the tension grew. Rumours were flying: the army had been mobilized. Bus-loads of rioters were coming in from the East. Russian agents provocateurs had been turned back at the border or were already in the country. Estonian nationalists were planning to launch a counter-attack that night.

At sunset the government weighed in as only an Estonian government could, sending an SMS to every mobile phone in the country: stay at home, stay calm, don't give in to provocation.

But by 21:00 pm, an angry crowd had already gathered on the Tonismagi hill, where the Bronze Soldier statue had stood only 24 hours before.

Shouts of "Shame! Shame!" and "Russia! Russia!" were going up. Some youths had already covered their faces in dark glasses and builder's dust-masks, to avoid both identification and tear gas.

Every now and then an arm would emerge from the crowd and hurl a bottle at the waiting police lines, to smash in brown foam on the tarmac. Afterwards, the Kremlin called them "peaceful demonstrators."

I was above and behind the police lines, but more demonstrators were coming down the hill behind me. Seeing my notebook, two of them stopped: short, broad, shaven-headed and aggressively drunk.

"You're a correspondent? What are you writing?" the bigger and drunker asked me in Russian, slurring the words.

"Not much," I said, which was true, but not intelligent.

"That's not enough! You have to fucking tell them that these Estonian pederasts are stealing the bones of our dead, and if you don't, I'll kill you!" he exploded, grabbing me round the neck.

I tried to step back, tried to get my halting Russian into gear to say something soothing - too late. The next thing I knew was a burning impact as he head-butted me full in the face.

"Write that!" he jeered, and walked off as the blood began to flow. I was still mopping myself up as the police began to advance, and the demonstration broke up into angry clusters, running up the hill towards me. At that point, I decided it was time to retreat.

That was my brief and inglorious part in the second night of the Tallinn riots. As the police and the rioters fought running battles through the town, I was in an ambulance, receiving treatment for a broken nose ("minor injuries", we called it in the report).

By the time I made it back into town - safely accompanied by two burly colleagues - the worst was already over. It has not been repeated since.

But the scars remain, and not just on my nose, which now looks like it's trying to act as a sun-shade for my right eye. Before the riots, Estonians, at least, were comfortable in their own country, convinced that they had no real problem with the Russian minority. Young Russians seemed ready to fit in and call Estonia their home.

Now, on both sides, the debate has begun: who are we? Who are they? Can we ever live peacefully side by side again?

The Bronze Soldier riots cost me some blood, a stinking headache and the classical beauty of my profile. Compared with the impact they had on Estonia, I got off lightly. (dpa)