Explore Tallinn

The Great Guild Hall on Pikk Street is a late Gothic guildhall completed in 1410 for the Great Guild, the association of Tallinn's wealthiest merchants, which met here until 1920. Its plain facade is divided by tall pointed blind niches; today the building is a branch of the Estonian History Museum, with exhibitions on Estonian history and Hanseatic trade.

The Niguliste Museum fills St. Nicholas' Church, a medieval merchants' church in Tallinn's Old Town, burnt in the bombing of March 1944 and reopened in 1984 as a branch of the Art Museum of Estonia. It shows ecclesiastical art, including a fragment of Bernt Notke's Dance of Death and Hermen Rode's high altar; a glass lift climbs the tower to a viewing deck.

Kiek in de Kök is a 38-metre artillery tower on the slope of Toompea, built in 1475 and named in Low German for the view its gunners had into the kitchens below. Now the Fortifications Museum of the Tallinn City Museum, it covers the tower, the Maiden, Stable and Gate towers on the town wall and 17th-century bastion passages with a carved stone collection.

The KGB Prison Cells are a museum in the basement of Pagari 1, a 1912 building in the Old Town that housed the Estonian Provisional Government in 1918 and served as headquarters of the Soviet NKVD and later the KGB for almost half a century. Run by Vabamu, the former cells hold an exhibition on the people imprisoned, interrogated and killed here.

Fat Margaret is a round artillery tower at the northern end of Pikk Street, built in 1511–1530 beside the Great Coastal Gate to guard the harbour approach; it is 25 metres across, with walls up to 5 metres thick. Since 1981 it has housed the Estonian Maritime Museum, with exhibitions on Estonian seafaring and a rooftop terrace.

The Seaplane Harbour is a branch of the Estonian Maritime Museum, housed in seaplane hangars with three reinforced-concrete domes built in 1916–1917 for Peter the Great's Naval Fortress and reopened in 2012 after restoration. Inside are the 1936 submarine Lembit and a replica Short 184 seaplane; the steam icebreaker Suur Tõll is moored at the quay.

Maarjamäe Palace is a historicist summer manor on the coast road east of central Tallinn, built in the 1870s for Count Anatoly Orlov-Davydov, with a crenellated tower beside the main house. As part of the Estonian History Museum it shows an exhibition on Estonia's 20th century, and its park holds a collection of dismantled Soviet-era statues.

The Estonian Open Air Museum at Rocca al Mare, on the coast about 8 km west of Tallinn's centre, gathers rural buildings from across Estonia on 72 hectares. Thatched farmsteads, the Sutlepa chapel, a village school, a tavern, windmills and watermills, and a 1960s collective-farm apartment block show country life of the past two centuries. It opened in 1964.