An excellent place to visit is the brand-new, very simple but also very impressing "Museum of Occupation and of the Fight for Freedom". Here you can walk through years of foreign occupation of Estonia and try to understand why most Estonians get moist eyes when even only humming their national anthem.
The museum gives you an overview of soviet and nazi occupation, and shows you how things changed. Though pretty small, you would need a lot of time to see everything. The main part of the exhibition is a collection of videos containing witness stories and historical overviews; it would take you hours to see everything. Luckily the documentaries can also be seen on the internet via
www.okupatsioon.ee.
Also impressing is the fact that the museum has for the most part been funded by an Estonian couple who have fled to the US before.
One point of critique though. Since Estonians tend to criticise some part of the Russian population for not integrating and not understanding Estonian culture and suffering), it is a bit of a shame that the only languages used here are Estonian and English. I am convinced that offering Russian texts would help the Russian population to get in touch with a part of their history they probably don't know that much about themselves...
A visit of the museum will cost you 10 krooni (about 2/3 of a coffee). Open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed on Mondays. I nice thing to do afterwards is to hike up the hill towards the parliament and admire the Estonian flag on Tall Hermann.
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on Jan 13, 2004
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