The Great Guild was the corporation of the lower town’s merchants, the men who controlled the council and therefore the town. Their hall on Pikk street was finished in 1410: a wide, two-aisled Gothic room on stout piers, built to hold the guild’s feasts, elections and courts, with cellars beneath and a stepped gable to the street. It is one of the most complete surviving medieval guild halls anywhere on the Baltic and was among the first buildings in Europe given the European Heritage Label, in 2014.
It now holds the Estonian History Museum’s permanent displays, and they are unusually well matched to the building. The Splendour of the Hanseatic League covers the merchant trade that paid for the hall — what went west, what came east, and how a Reval merchant actually lived. Power of the Elite, in the basement rooms, is about the Great Guild itself: who was admitted, what it cost, and how the guild ran the town. Striking It Rich?! is the numismatic collection, coins and other means of payment used in Estonia across the centuries — bracteates, thalers, hoards.
The room our readers will want is the Armoury (Relvakamber), which the museum describes as the largest collection of weapons in Estonia: edged weapons, firearms and armour. There is also a Chamber of Legends aimed squarely at children.
The cellar is the sleeper. Archaeological excavation in 2010 uncovered the walls of the building that stood here before 1410 and medieval wells, and they are shown in situ under the museum floor. From 1437 the guild’s cellar was leased out as a wine tavern known as Das Süsse Loch, the “sweet burrow” — the drinking hole of the medieval town’s establishment, and it is written into the display.
It is a hundred metres from Town Hall Square, open Tuesday to Sunday, and last admission is thirty minutes before it shuts.
