Tammsaare Park

This guide to Tammsaare Park in Tallinn returns to the sixteenth of October, 1905, when thousands of unarmed workers gathered at what was then the town's open-air market to hear speakers demand freedom during a general strike sweeping the Russian Empire. Imperial troops opened fire on the crowd without warning, and the guide follows the disputed death toll and the mass funeral that turned into Tallinn's largest political demonstration. It traces how that market ground became a quiet city park, and what a stark granite marker placed here decades later chose to say, and not say, about that afternoon.