Tallinn’s Oldest Museum Celebrates an Anniversary

Text Timo Raussi
Photo Tallinn City Museum

Lorenz Heinrich Petersen: “Peter the Great’s House in Kadriorg”. Coloured lithograph (1860–1870), TLM G 7167

If you think Tallinn’s oldest museum is located in the Old Town, think again. That distinction belongs to Peter the Great’s House in Kadriorg, located near the Presidential Palace and Kumu. The building is also known as Peter the Great’s Summer Manor.

The building in question, and we are not talking about the grand Kadriorg Palace that now houses an art museum, but rather the modest one-storey house on Mäekalda Street, is currently celebrating a significant anniversary. It was converted into a museum and opened to the public 220 years ago, in 1806.

The house was built in 1662 by Hinrich Fonne, chief secretary of Tallinn Town Hall, for his family. More than fifty years later, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great purchased the property and the surrounding land because he admired the view of the sea and the city from the nearby cliff. He commissioned a two-room extension to the house and stayed there with his wife while Kadriorg Palace was being built between 1718 and 1725. As you may remember from history lessons, or have read in travel articles, the Tsar never lived to see the completed palace used for its intended purpose.

After Peter the Great’s death, both the house and the palace remained largely unused for a long period. During a visit to Tallinn in 1804, Emperor Alexander I ordered the dilapidated house to be restored and the later extension demolished. As a result, the building acquired its present appearance, and two years later a museum was opened there. Since 1941, the house has been part of the Tallinn City Museum network.

Throughout this summer, until the end of September, a special exhibition is on display in the house museum’s entrance hall and staircase gallery. Through texts, infographics and archival photographs in Estonian and English, it tells the story of the museum itself. A central part of the museum’s appeal remains its extensive collection of original objects and furniture, many of which were already in use at Peter the Great’s Tallinn residence some 300 years ago and have survived in remarkably good condition.

For the exhibition, a particularly noteworthy painting has also been temporarily returned to the entrance hall. It was last displayed in the same location in the late 1930s, shortly before the Second World War. The work is a ceremonial portrait of Empress Catherine II, who ruled Russia during the latter part of the 18th century.

To learn more about this and similar topics
18th-century artefacts house museum Kadriorg Museum Peter the Great’s House Tallinn tsar