Tallinn Trip – Carved Stone Museum

Located just after the Bastion Tunnels is the Carved Stone Museum, all of which is located within the Kiek in de Kök tower fortifications complex museum. There are over 200 carved stone fragments from around Tallinn and they date from between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

I rather get the impression that they didn’t know where to put this collection and here seemed as good as place as any. It’s one of those collections which museums need to keep, but are unlikely to attract enough tourists in their own right, so this seems like the perfect compromise.

It’s an interesting little arrangement.

There are short summaries about many of the pieces of stone, although not a great deal is known about a lot of them.

There were a few gravestones in the mix.

The stone background of the walls felt appropriate.

Some stalactites had started to form, it all added to the atmosphere somewhat.

Lots more stone and they’ve done a decent job here given that some of this was usually partly underwater about 25 years ago before they started the repairs. There are four different rooms, ‘Garden of Eden’, ‘Pillar Hall’, ‘Death Hall’ and ‘Sun Hall’ and if I have to pick a favourite (and who doesn’t when visiting a carved stone museum?) it would be the room with the pillars in it. Another exciting surprise was finding where the tunnels came out, it was much further away from the museum than we had anticipated.