Estonian Maritime Museum – Fat Margaret
Medieval cannon tower at Tallinn's shore gate, home to the Estonian Maritime Museum and a 700-year-old wreck.
Fat Margaret is a squat artillery tower built between 1511 and 1530 beside the Great Coast Gate, the medieval entrance to Tallinn from its harbour. The drum measures about twenty-five metres across, with walls reaching some five metres in thickness. Once the city's defences became obsolete the tower served as a gunpowder store and later as a prison, which was stormed during the unrest of 1917. It was rebuilt between 1978 and 1981 to house the Estonian Maritime Museum.
After a two-year reconstruction designed by KOKO Arhitektid, the museum and visitor centre reopened on 28 November 2019 with a new permanent display on Estonian seafaring, shipbuilding and navigation. Roughly 700 objects, ship models and interactive stations fill the tower, while a purpose-built hall in the courtyard shelters a medieval ship about 700 years old recovered in Tallinn. A lift, the first installed in an Old Town tower, reaches a rooftop terrace overlooking the port and the city wall.
Highlights
- Medieval cannon tower with walls up to about five metres thick
- Medieval ship roughly 700 years old in a purpose-built courtyard hall
- Permanent display on Estonian seafaring with around 700 objects
- Rooftop terrace reached by lift, with views over the harbour
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