Tallinn Town Hall

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Tallinn Town Hall
Tallinn Town Hall
General information
Architectural style	Gothic
Town or city	Tallinn
Country	Estonia
Construction started	13th century
Completed	1404

The Tallinn Town Hall (Estonian: Tallinna raekoda) is a building in the Old Town of Tallinn (Reval), the capital city of Estonia. It is located in the south side of the Town Hall Square (the medieval market square) and is 36.8 metres (121 ft) long. The west wall is 14.5 metres (48 ft) in length, and the east is 15.2 metres (50 ft).^[1] It is a two-storey building with a spacious basement.^[2] It is the oldest town hall in the whole Baltic Sea region and Scandinavia.

The weather vane "Old Thomas" (Estonian: Vana Toomas) on the top of the town hall's spire, that has been there since 1530, is one of the symbols of Tallinn. The height of the tower is 64 metres. One of the shortest streets of Tallinn is Raekoja Street, literally the "Town Hall Street", located behind the Town Hall building.

The town hall was built by what was then the market square. The town hall square got its current length in the 1370s. Covered with a board roof in 1374, the town hall was probably a single-decked stone building with a basement. The attic was used as a storeroom. The façade of this long and narrow building is now a rear wall of the arcade, where some of the simple statuary framed windows from this time are still visible.^[3]

A town hall with a huge meeting room was first mentioned in a real estate book in 1322 as a consistorium, which had a giant warehouse (cellarium civitatis) for the time.^[1] Some walls in the eastern part of the modern town hall and seven windows in the basement and on the ground floor have remained from that time.^[1] In 1364, it was called a playhouse (teatrum) and in 1372 a town hall (Rathus).^[4]

During World War II, in March 1944, the town hall building was damaged in a fire and the spire was completely destroyed as a result of a bombing raid by Soviet air force. The building was restored and a new spire was erected on the tower after the war.

Although the city administration worked in the town hall until 1970, it still holds the role of a representational building of the city administration.^[5] In conjunction with the Tallinn Old Town, the town hall has been on the UNESCO world Heritage Sites list since 1997.^[6]

In 2005, the Tallinn Town Hall received a high recognition – second prize in the category of conservation of Architectural Heritage for the revival of the last surviving Gothic Town Hall in Northern Europe and the exemplary revealing of all the historical layers of this icon of the great European tradition of municipal power.^[7][8]

In the 1870s, when the Town Hall was going through a renovation, the workers found behind a cabin, 14 wooden boxes with old documents which had not been opened for several centuries. The oldest document was from 1248. The 300 documents span from period 1200-1700 and are written in Latin, Low German, High German and Swedish.^[9]