Estonian Maritime Museum
Nautical history in medieval tower
At the northern end of the street, Pikk is straddled by the Great Sea Gate (Suur rannavärav), a sixteenth-century arch flanked by two towers. The larger of these, the barrel-shaped “Fat Margaret” (Paks Margareeta), has walls 4m thick. It now houses seafaring and fishing departments of the Estonian Maritime Museum (Eesti meremuuseum), a diverting collection of model boats and nautical ephemera spread out over several floors. Sounding a poignant note, one of the exhibits is a scale model of the Estonia, the car ferry that sank midway between Tallinn and Stockholm on September 28, 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
Formerly the city jail, Fat Margaret witnessed Tallinn’s first outbreak of violence during the Revolution of March 1917, when striking workers joined mutineering soldiers and sailors in an assault on the prison, murdering the warders and setting the tower alight.
The area on the far side of Fat Margaret, now occupied by a road junction and a few scrappy bits of park, used to be known as the Parrot Garden in honour of the “parrot shooting” contests held here every spring in medieval times. Victors were presented with a silver salver and then borne in triumphal procession along Pikk to the Great Guild.