Toompea Castle

Toompea hill carried an ancient Estonian stronghold from at least the 9th century. In 1219 it was taken by Danish crusaders under King Valdemar II, and a cherished Danish legend holds that during a critical stage of the fighting — the Battle of Lindanise — the Dannebrog, the flag of Denmark, fell from the sky. The first proper castle that followed was called the Castle of the Danes, castrum danorum in Latin and taani linna in the archaic Estonian of the day, from which the name of the city of Tallinn is possibly derived. Another tradition, recorded in the 19th century, tells the hill's own origin story: the heroine Linda piled it up boulder by boulder with her own hands.

In 1227 the castle passed to the Order of the Brethren of the Sword, who began rebuilding it; the 13th-century reconstruction is to a large extent the castle that can be seen today. It fell back to Denmark just ten years later, in 1237, then was sold to the Teutonic Order in 1346 and stayed in the knights' hands for the rest of the Middle Ages. Because the Teutonic Order was a religious order, the castle came to resemble a monastery, with a chapel, a chapter house and a dormitory for the knights.

The order raised the castle's towers: Pilsticker, the arrow-sharpener; Stür den Kerl, ward off the enemy; Landskrone, crown of the land; and Pikk Hermann — Tall Hermann — 48 metres tall and still dominating the skyline. After the Reformation and the wars of the 16th century the Teutonic Order lost its last possessions in Estonia, and the region was contested by Sweden, Poland and Muscovy. By 1561 northern Estonia was Swedish, and Sweden's rulers turned the medieval fortress into a ceremonial and administrative seat of political power — the purpose it has served ever since.

Sweden lost Estonia to Russia in 1710, and the old western castle stood empty after the Great Northern War. Catherine II's tour of the Baltic governorates in 1764 changed that: the empress ordered a grander, more modern seat for the province, funded by a tax of one to fifteen roubles according to rank. Between 1767 and 1773 the eastern wing was rebuilt as a Baroque and early Neoclassical palace by the architect Johann Schultz of Jena — a work that cost the fortress part of its ring wall, the corner tower Stür den Kerl and the old state-hall building, while the moats before the castle were filled in. The palace housed the administration of the Governorate of Estonia and the living quarters of the imperial governor.

The palace gained a public park — the Governor's Garden, among Tallinn's first — and, in the 19th century, an archive building, while from 1843 a governorate prison designed by Johann Schelbach occupied a wing of the old convent quarter; it was burned down during the revolution of March 1917.

After Estonia won independence in 1918, the new state demolished the ruined convent building of the Teutonic Order and raised its parliament house on the spot between 1920 and 1922, to designs by Eugen Habermann and Herbert Johanson. The plan follows the vanished convent, courtyard and all; the exterior is traditionalist, but the interior is Expressionist — the world's only Expressionist parliament building, and one contemporaries found baffling. A southern wing followed in 1935, to a design reworked by the young architect Alar Kotli for the Ministry of the Interior.

From June 1940 the occupations came in succession — Soviet until 1941, Nazi German from 1941 to 1944, Soviet again thereafter — and Estonia's democratically elected parliament was disbanded. Between 1947 and 1990 the castle housed the Supreme Soviet, the rubber-stamp legislature of occupied Estonia. Today the complex is again the seat of the Riigikogu, and every day at sunrise the flag of Estonia is hoisted to the top of Tall Hermann to the sound of the national anthem, and lowered at sunset.