St. Nicholas' Church & Museum

This guide to St. Nicholas' Church in Tallinn begins around 1230, when Westphalian merchants raised it at the harbor's edge and dedicated it to the patron saint of sailors facing a sea that could turn from calm to killing chop within the hour. You'll hear how the church doubled as a strongroom for valuable cargo, and how the surviving fragment of Bernt Notke's Dance of Death, painted at the end of the fourteen hundreds, put a king, a bishop and a merchant in the same unstoppable line. Stand before that painting and consider what the men who built this place were really insuring against.