Patarei Merekindlus

This guide to Patarei Merekindlus in Tallinn asks you to kneel in a ground-floor room and press your forehead to a wall thousands of prisoners once touched. Built in 1840 as a fortress guarding the sea approach to Saint Petersburg, it spent most of the twentieth century as a prison, first under independent Estonia, then seized by Soviet secret police in 1940. During the 1980 Moscow Olympics, guards shuttered every seaward window, so ships passing by would never glimpse the faces watching from inside.