Explore Tartu

Tartu Art Museum, founded in 1940, collects Estonian art from the 18th century to the present, some 23,000 works. Its exhibitions are held in the Leaning House on Town Hall Square, a three-storey house built in 1793 whose log foundations in the soft riverbank have sunk on one side, so that it tilts by about 5.8 degrees.

The Main Building of the University of Tartu is a classicist building with a six-column portico, designed by Johann Wilhelm Krause and built between 1804 and 1809. It houses the University of Tartu Art Museum, founded in 1803, and guided visits show the assembly hall and the attic lock-up where students were detained as punishment in the 19th century.

Tartu Old Observatory was built between 1808 and 1810 to designs by Johann Wilhelm Krause on the eastern slope of Toome Hill. Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve worked here and measured the distance to the star Vega; as the first point of the Struve Geodetic Arc it is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is now a museum of the University of Tartu.

St. John's Church is a Brick Gothic Lutheran church in Tartu's old town, dedicated to John the Baptist, with parts dating from the 14th century. Its walls were once set with more than a thousand hand-made terracotta figures, of which about 200 survive. The church was largely rebuilt after both the Great Northern War and the Second World War.

Tartu Cathedral is the ruin of a Brick Gothic church on Toome Hill, begun in the 13th century and completed around 1500 as the seat of the bishops of Tartu. Wrecked after the Reformation and the Livonian War, its choir was rebuilt in the early 1800s as the university library and now houses the University of Tartu Museum; the towers open in summer.

The University of Tartu Botanical Garden was founded in 1803 and has occupied a former bastion on Lai Street, at the northern edge of the old town, since 1806. Its open-air collections are laid out as eleven gardens around a pond, and the greenhouses, including a palm house, hold tropical and desert plants as well as turtles, fish and parrots.