A quarter of an hour of heart fairytale medieval Tallinn, we enter the remains of a completely different historical moment, when Estonia was Soviet border coast and therefore off limits to anyone who did not have permission. Here is Patarei , a former barracks and tsarist army coastal battery of mid-nineteenth century become a prison for the first Estonian republic. After the Soviet occupation, Moscow housing adapted to their needs within the walls of political prisoners or about to be deported to Siberia. For decades, was one of the major centers of Soviet repression in Estonia as it was run by the KGB as a maximum security prison. And in the Second World War, the Nazi army detained about a thousand Jews in this place.
The new republic estonia Patarei maintained as a prison for common criminals after the fall of the Iron Curtain until 2003. Five years later, it reopened as a museum and anyone can pay two euros and lost in its corridors, solitary confinement, exercise areas for prisoners, psychiatric ward or see the remains of the gallows in the execution chamber. The building has been left as it was to finish his prison activities and have been brought to the stage elements of its Soviet past, as the signs in Russian, traces of drugs in the nursing time and fragments of files from the old administration . Maintenance is intentionally minimal, so that moisture and poor lighting are added to the prison architecture to create a feeling suffocating to tour the galleries.
In a courtyard facing the sea, a small outdoor cafe where you can take some looking at the Baltic through the barbed wire. The guides have to add cruelty to imprisonment, political prisoners were allocated to the pavilion overlooking the sea, to contemplate a freedom unattainable. The torture and abuse detainees have left several ghost stories, especially in those cells where suicides were more frequent.
But Patarei is more than a prison moldy, rusty cell and increased humidity. In 2009, a group of artists led by the University of Helsinki reflected on the accumulated suffering in prison and set their creations in various prison cells. They called Preliminary Investigation (preliminary investigation) and Spanish artists participated. Thus, one could find an angel drawn on the wall next to a poem, or a large patch of blood red paint with the word pain (pain) scrawled on the wall in full rubber room (small room with thick walls and without windows to the guards took the prisoners for the sole purpose of giving them a beating).
In the month of August is the Patareiv. DJs and a good team encourage the prison yard by the sea until dawn. The Facebook event this year and has confirmed 230 people and another 1,000 to be confirmed. Concerts, orienteering or exhibitions are part of the cultural program between May and October. If open (spring to autumn), we can take an interesting experience. They also organize tours for groups dramatized.
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