University of Tartu Museum

Atop Toomemägi would be the ruins of a Gothic cathedral, built in the 13th century from the knights of the Livonian Order after forcing the ancestral Estonians from the organic defensive formation. It was substantially rebuilt in the 15th century, despoiled through the Reformation in 1525, utilized as a barn, and partially rebuilt between 1804 and 1809 to house the college library, and is presently a museum. Indoors there is a selection of fascinating exhibits chronicling student life.

Estonian Print & Paper Museum

A cure for term nerds, layout hounds and publish junkies alike, this interactive museum concentrates on the history of printing and paper-making. Machinery from throughout the ages is on permanent display, and there is a gallery with rotating displays plus a small choice of handmade laptops for sale. Tickets contain an hour-long excursion in English from the beautiful museum manager, Lemmit, full of demonstrations and the chance to produce your own prints or paper onto one of the classic presses.

Estonian National Museum

This huge, low-slung, glass-clad construction is arresting — both Estonians and design fans purred as it started in late 2016. The permanent exhibition’Encounters’ covers nationwide prehistory and history in some detail, paying lots of attention to the period of Soviet jobs (fittingly — that the memorial has been built over a former Soviet airstrip). Under ground, the lovely’Echo of the Urals’ display provides a summary of the several individuals creating the Finno-Ugric language family, and there is a hallway for the wonderful temporary displays.

Tartu Old Observatory

Constructed as a member of Tartu University in 1810, this fascinating observatory on Toomemägi is essential for lovers of astronomy and the history of scientific discovery. The sober, studious-looking centre, topped with a moving observational tower, houses a number of the most well-known artefacts of all 19th-century astronomy, all exhibited in excellent order. It is possible to scale the towerwhere a huge Zeiss Refractor stays in place; there is a basement display on seismology; and interactive-learning shows wait at the Western Hall.

Tartu Art Museum

If you have been socialising in Tartu’s bars and can not see directly, do not use this construction to anchor your own eye. Subsidence resulting from the neighboring Emajõgi River provides the 1793 construction — former residence of an exiled Scot who identified himself from the Russian military — a queasy lean of 5.8°, which will be over the Tower of Pisa.

KGB Cells Museum

This former KGB headquarters and prison, also called the’Grey House’, was given to Tartu City Museum from the household to which they had been returned following the Soviet era. Chilling in components, the memorial has produced an extremely rewarding exhibition covering deportations, life in the gulags, the Estonian immunity, and that which went on here. Guided tours are $20 additional. Temporary exhibits visit, and intermittent’Dark Nights’ reveal how frightening the cells might be.

Aparaaditehas

Aparaaditehas (the Widget Factory) is an outdated 14,000-sq-metre Soviet-era industrial complex where pipes equipment and key submarine components were created with umbrellas and zips which didn’t operate, to fool the people. Now it is Tartu’s hippest dining, drinking, shopping and cultural hub — smaller kin into Tallinn’s Telliskivi Creative City. Broad painted stripes evoke its industrial past, while stencils and graffiti decorate its current.

Tartu University

Fronted by six Doric columns, the impressive principal building of Tartu University was built between 1803 and 1809. The college itself was founded in 1632 by the king Gustaf II Adolf (Gustavus Adolphus) to train Lutheran clergy and police officers. Modelled at Uppsala University in Sweden, its primary campus and also the website of its historical buildings are located behind this neoclassical heap, one of the trees and meandering paths of beautiful Toomemägi.

Tartu Toy Museum

A major hit with all the under-eight audience (and you won’t find a lot of adults worried to depart ), this is a superb spot to while away several rainy hours. Place in one of those best-preserved late-18th-century buildings in the region, this fantastic museum showcases dolls, model trains, rocking horses, toy soldiers and plenty of other desirables. It is all aimed to be well interactive, with displays in pull-out drawers along with a kids’ playroom (open 10 am to 4 pm).

Estonian Sports and Olympic Museum

Chronicling over simply Estonian Olympic excellence (even though the glittering decoration screen serves that purpose ), this offbeat museum features a true sense of fun. While the photographs of puffed-up early-20th-century bodybuilders in posing components imply that they took themselves exceptionally seriously, there is no requirement that you need to. If you feel motivated, have a spin on the exercise bicycles, test your stamina to the interactive tug-of-war, push a digital rally car or modify the action on a genuine one.

Science Centre AHHAA

This hot center’s interactive displays are accountable to bring out the scientist in children and grownups alike. Allow at least a few hours for button-pushing water squirting and knob-twiddling, it all made to inculcate a few scientific principles. Workshops delve into the mysteries of caffeine crystals or crystals; the Planetarium runs hot hour-long displays, and upstairs there is a nightmarish meeting of pickled organs and deformed fetuses in Tartu University’s collection.

Town Hall

Constructed between 1782 and 1789, this graceful building was designed by German architect JHB Walter, who built it on a normal Dutch city hall. The clear focus of a cobbled square harmoniously lined with classical facades, it is topped by a tower and weather vane, and a clock has been added to promote punctuality from Tartu’s pupils. In addition to the council offices, it includes the tourist information center and a drugstore.

Town Hall Square

Tartu’s most important square is lined with grand buildings and echoes using the chink of glasses and plates in summer. The centerpiece is the city hall, fronted by a statue of pupils kissing beneath a spouting umbrella. On the south side of the square, keep an eye out for its communist hammer-and-sickle relief which nonetheless remains about the facade of Number 5.

St John’s Lutheran Church

Dating to 1323, this imposing red-brick church is exceptional for the infrequent terracotta sculptures put in markets around its exterior and interior (appear ). Shattered with a Soviet bombing raid in 1944, it lay derelict and was not fully restored until 2005. Climb the 135 measures of this 30m steeple to get a bird’s-eye view of Tartu.

Upside Down House

Seeking something out of The Wizard of Oz, the Upside Down House is precisely that: a normal home perched on its mind, with everything inside — ceilings, flooring, furniture inverted. It is a little harmless fun as soon as you’re tired of those substantial attractions of the local Estonian National Museum.

Citizen’s Home Museum

This handsome wooden home, relationship to the 1740s and nestled in one of the earliest surviving sections of town, is supplied to demonstrate the way the bourgeois family in the 1830s lived. The attention to detail is striking: entire rooms stick to the Biedermeier style’ which has been in vogue at the moment.

Tartu University Botanical Gardens

Launched in 1803, these lush, mature gardens blossom 6500 species, such as a massive group of palms and other exotics from the greenhouse. In summer it is often filled with neighborhood families drifting paths lined with 20th-century sculptures, or catching some bud from the ornamental lake.

Tartu University Art Museum

Within the primary college building, this group includes chiefly 19th-century plaster copies of ancient Greek sculptures, also some mummies along with other original artifacts exhibited from the Chamber of Mummies painted to look just like the inside of an Egyptian grave. The remaining part of the group was evacuated to Russia in 1915 and hasn’t returned. Admission includes entry to the loft lock-up, in which recalcitrant pupils were held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months — several examples of the 19th-century graffiti stay.

Raadi Manor Park

On the primary street heading north from town stands the gloomy remains of Raadi Manor, one-time house of the von Liphartide family. It passed into the University of Tartu from the 1920s, but the Soviets took a portion of this property to construct a WWII airfield, bringing bombing that left the once-beautiful baroque-style constructing a red-brick shell. Even though the surrounding parks can not match its 18th-century prime, most locals still come to roam about and swim in the lake.

A Le Coq Beer Museum

Occupying an 1898 tower at Tartu’s famous brewery, 10 minutes’ walk northwest of the center, compulsory tours of the museum trace the background of beer because of early Egypt, before focusing on contemporary processes and machines, then dispensing free samples. There is also a gift store with various brews and tons of products available (10am to 5 pm Tuesday to Friday, to 4.30 pm Saturday).

Sacrificial Stone

In pagan times, offerings were abandoned at the cup-shaped depressions carved into this stone and the hundreds like it which are scattered around the nation. In fact, offerings continue to be abandoned; you will frequently find flowers or coins, even on these stones which have made their way to museums, and with this specific stone, pupils depart burnt offerings of the lecture notes.