St. Catherine's Passage

This guide to St. Catherine's Passage in Tallinn opens with a chisel cutting a merchant family's coat of arms into limestone around 1388, one of the oldest carved tombstones in the city. It follows the names of merchants and their wives bought into stone by Tallinn's two great guilds, the Great Guild and the Brotherhood of the Blackheads, and how those slabs paved a church floor for centuries. A nobleman named Girard de Soucanton carted them off to his private estate in 1882, to decorate a garden path he called Via Appia.