Vintage Photographs of Reval / Talinn
Erich Sonntag's collection is always up for a surprise--and today I've got a bunch of old photographs of Reval I found tucked away amidst the postcards from the USSR
Every now and then, I do find some really cool and unexpected things tucked amidst the vintage postcards: old photographs.
I’ve now found some from Reval—today: Talinn, capital of Estonia—in the interwar period (which I’ll post below), I do have quite a few from Budapest before the Second World War, and even a few from post-1949 China.
That being said, this is neither the first of such postings—remember the pictures from Istanbul?—nor will it be the last one.
That being said, let’s check out old Reval together, shall we?
Reval, or Talinn, is an Old City
From the 13th century until the first half of the 20th century, Tallinn was known in most of the world by variants of its other historical name Reval.
Tallinn received Lübeck city rights in 1248; however, the earliest evidence of human settlement in the area dates back nearly 5,000 years. The medieval indigenous population of what is now Tallinn and north Estonia was one of the last “pagan” civilisations in Europe to adopt Christianity following the Papal-sanctioned Northern Crusades in the 13th century. The first recorded claim over the place was laid by Denmark after a successful raid in 1219 led by King Valdemar II, followed by a period of alternating Scandinavian and Teutonic rulers. Due to the strategic location by the sea, its medieval port became a significant trade hub, especially in the 14–16th centuries, when Tallinn grew in importance as the northernmost member city of the Hanseatic League. Tallinn Old Town is one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. [source]
Of course, every entrance into Reval would begin at the Old City Gate (above); in the old town, there one finds the Parliament of Estonia in Toompea Castle (below):
Behold the tower Kick in de Kök, one of many surviving towers guarding the old town:
Above the old town, perched atop a small hill, we find St Olav’s Church, believed to have been built in the 12th century and extensively rebuilt two centuries later. That huge tower on the right-hand side of the picture goes by the name Fat Margaret, and today it houses the city’s maritime museum [I’ve had to EDIT this caption as I mistakenly added a wrongful description; kudos to Twitter/X user @tiamana].
If these “old houses” as the reverse of the photograph holds are in Reval’s main square I don’t know—they might very well be there, though…
A panoramic view of the old town of Reval, with the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in the background (see below for another image):
That’s it for today—I’ll leave you with a more recent picture postcard to convey another, more colourful impression from the 1970s:
The first one of these in a while that’s of someplace I’ve been. A pretty town; I had a nice time there.
I never knew the name Reval. There are a lot of these German names of places in central and eastern Europe that are now known by their indigenous names which may be still be fairly familiar to some, but I still encounter them piecemeal with some surprise.