Until recently, Patarei Fortress evoked rather gloomy impressions. After all, for almost a century, it housed a notorious prison. However, the fortress itself was built before that and was intended to be used for military purposes.

"At the beginning of the 18th century, there was a wooden fortress here, built by order of Tsar Peter I during the Great Northern War. In the 19th century, it became necessary to fortify the coastline, and that is when the gorge building appeared. The building is 250 meters long," said Oksana Jaakson of the Estonian Center for Architecture.

The gorge is the central part of the fortress, from where artillery fire was conducted. Together with the adjacent casemates (fortified gun emplacements or armored structures -ed.) above, it forms the shape of a marine sextant (a doubly reflecting navigation instrument that measures the angular distance between two visible objects -ed.).

Although the fortress looked powerful, at the time of its construction, the range of naval guns had increased significantly, so in terms of defense, the fortress no longer corresponded to reality.

"Throughout the Crimean War, the fortress remained on full combat alert, but never saw action. Afterwards, it was decided to remove Reval (the official name for Tallinn from the 13th century until 1919 – ed.) from the list of fortress cities, and so this fortress lost its significance as a fortification," explained Jaakson.

In 1919, it was decided to turn the fortress building into a prison, and it remained that way until the early 2000s. After the prison's closure, the building served as a kind of museum for a long time, where visitors could wander through the prison corridors and read the inscription on walls of the cells. The minimum number of prisoners in the prison at any one time was 500, and the maximum was 12,000, so conditions there were quite harsh.

After the prison closed, there was a great deal of discussion about what to do with the building. In the end, it was purchased by entrepreneur Urmas Sõrumaa.

"According to the current plans, apartments will be built in the casemates on the sea side, which will then be rented out.  Some dissenting voices did begin to ask: 'How can you live in such places, where the walls remember everything, where blood flowed like a river? Because of that kind of talk, the owner called on Orthodox priests to consecrate the territory," said Jaakson.

The prison's legacy is, however, becoming a thing of the past. The former exercise yards have already been demolished, as have many of the internal cells. Concerts have been held in the upper courtyard, and according to Sõrumaa's plan, there will soon be a "garden city" there, covered by a glass dome.

A center for the victims of communism will also be built at the site.

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