4/03/2013

Prison fortress (Part 1), Tallinn, Estonia


Visited 9.2.2013 by skkye & jonahi. Sorry for the radio silence! We are both quite busy these days. Here are some photos for you from our weekend trip to Estonia in February. Weather wasn't the most optimal for exploring, but we and our cameras (and our poor couchsurfing host who catch a cold) could surrender a couple of hours in the grey mist and wet snowfall.
Our destination was this 170 years old prison by the Baltic Sea. Russian emperor Nikolai I ordered to build this place for a sea fortress in 1828, and the fortress was ready in 1840. Soon it was changed into barracks and in 1920 into a prison. Last prisoner left the prison in 2002 when a new prison was built in Tartu. Today the old prison serves as a cultural park and a museum, but only in summertime. That's why we could get inside to only a few prisoner cells, but the area was so huge that there was plenty to see in the yard also. The place wasn't nothing like the Finnish prisons that look like full board hotels compared to this almost medieval dungeon, and it's horrible to think how the prisoners must have suffered in the soviet prison with the icy wind blowing from the sea. There was also a doghouse on the yard reminding us of an angrily barking soviet watchdog.

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