The nearly 500-year-old carpets were made in Belgium, which at the time was a center for producing heraldic tapestries. They were commissioned in 1547 and completed in 1548 as a set. The designs include Tallinn's red and white shield, knights, animals and plants.

"These tapestries are very rare. I've never seen them unrolled before," said Pia Ehasalu, research director at the Tallinn City Museum told Tuesday's "Ringvaade". "This is a major celebration for art historians. We are used to working only with photographs. These tapestries are the crown jewels of the Tallinn City Museum."

Pierre Maes, director of the Royal Tapestry Workshop of Belgium, said it is not unusual to see carpets like this in Belgium, but it is very rare to find them further east.

He said Tallinn's tapestries still bear the original markings that many other tapestries have lost over the centuries.

"We see tapestries like that, but they are quite rare. What is much rarer than that is to see them still with the mark of the town that made them and the workshop that made them. This is very important archival material, because most of the time it disappears from tapestries," Maes told the show.

"These are placed in the borders, the borders of the tapestries get damaged over 500 years, as you can imagine, manipulating them, sometimes accidents can happen. So still having that information on tapestries is quite extraordinary. But we definitely know it is a complete set, all the tapestries were ordered together," he continued.

"So it is really exceptional to see these tapestries, and for us too it is very special," he said.

Merike Neidorp, senior conservator at the Tallinn City Museum, said they have not seen designs featuring plants before.

"Dirt and light have damaged the tapestries, mice have eaten them. Unfortunately, we cannot restore the original color, but overall, the set has been preserved quite well to this day," she said.

Maes explained: "These types of tapestries were produced a lot because they had a lot of success at the time. They were a way to bring nature inside the house. To bring not only nature, but an ideal [of] nature, a kind of an Eden garden, a heaven, inside the house, and to dream about a nature that had a lot of flowers, a lot of animals. Living in an ideal world was very important in the cold winter months /.../ it was a way for people to dream of the outside."

You can watch the broadcast below (mostly in Estonian).

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