Guided tour: The KGB Cells Museum • World Logging Championship 2023

The most beautiful town in Estonia, as the old song goes, or the Athens of River Emajõgi, as the old saying goes, was not spared in the whirlwinds of war of the 20th century. Tartu was one of the hardest-hit towns during World War II. It was not completely razed to the ground like the border town Narva but its face was changed to the extent of unrecognizable. Of the rapidly alternating cycle of German and Soviet occupations, the latter endured the longest and plunged Estonia, and Tartu into a stupor of a half century. In order to keep things under control and terrorize the population opposing the foreign regime, prisons and detention centers sprang up everywhere. The most notorious in Tartu was the so-called „grey house“, a pre-trial prison for political prisoners, now the KGB Cells Museum. The museum tells the story of the Soviet repression and survival of the native resistance through many decades until Estonia’s independence was restored.