Patarei Prison

It was built as a sea fortress, became a barracks, then a prison, and held prisoners for 86 years.

Patarei, meaning the Battery, covers about four hectares on the shore of Tallinn Bay in the Kalamaja district of Tallinn. Emperor Nicholas I ordered it built, and it went up between 1830 and 1837 as part of the tsarist Russian fortifications. In 1864, after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, Tallinn was struck off the empire's list of fortresses and the fort was converted into barracks.

The Republic of Estonia, independent from 1918, rebuilt it as a prison after the First World War. From 1919 it replaced the city's earlier jails in Toompea Castle and the Fat Margaret artillery tower, both damaged by fires during the revolutions of 1917. It went on serving as Tallinn Central Prison until 2005.

For Estonians it is one of the most prominent symbols of Soviet and Nazi political terror, and that is the weight the building carries. In 2018 the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory began preparing a museum of the crimes of communism, with an international research centre attached, planned for roughly 5,000 square metres in the eastern part of the complex and scheduled to open in 2027.

The archaeologist Paul Belford wrote about the site in 2013 for the Buildings Archaeology Group Newsletter under a title that names the difficulty precisely: problematic built heritage and dark tourism. That is the live question here. The building is enormous, half-ruined, photogenic and genuinely grim, and what a country does with a structure like that, while people who were held in it are still alive, is not a settled matter.

Go when the museum opens, and read the history before you photograph the corridors.