Old Market

Old Market or Vanaturu is an ancient trading spot where all the major roads out of Tallinn once started. Here you can still see several well preserved gothic facades and take in the medieval atmosphere on the nearby Olde Hansa restaurant, a place that perfectly captures the essence of mediaeval cuisine in Tallinn. For example, the most common drinks at the time were beer and mead. The wealthy merchants preferred imported wines. Water was not clean and not suitable for drinking. Another popular drink was claret, a version of a strong wine with plenty of added spices that was sold at the pharmacy. Eating in a medieval feast meant filling your stomach up to the brim, resting a bit and eating some more.

There are some fine examples of Tallinn’s typical Gothic merchant’s houses here as well, like the Peppersack, another restaurant. The word peppersack was used as a nickname for rich men as pepper was almost as expensive as gold back in those days. A two-room building called “diele-dornse” house was typical for the time. Diele was a bigger room at the street side and a smaller living room called the dornse was further back in the yard. The diele served as office in the case of merchants, and a workshop for artisans. The dornse was considerably smaller and lower and also the only part of the house that was heated. The upper floors of the houses served as storage rooms and were accessed from inside the building by a small staircase behind a locked door. From the outside they could be accessed by special doors in every floor reached with the help of ropes with hooks and pulley mechanisms.