Patarei Sea Fortress Prison

If you’ve ever taken the tour of Kilmanen jail you will have an idea of the macabre tourist attraction that I went to yesterday. It was a former Soviet prison which has now been turned into a poorly kept museum. This bleak and overgrown building that was once the scene the much misery and horror is now one of a number of such attractions in the Baltic countries.

The cells contained twenty prisoners each, steel bunk beds were squeezed in beside each other, light was minimal and the toilet facilities were far far far from ideal. Their was one particularly ghastly room in the prison which was called the “Hanging Room“, no prizes for guessing what happened there.

On a somewhat lighter note, during our short imprisonment, Tiiu and I came across a group of tourists who had locked themselves inside one of the corridors. It took a minute or two before they convinced us that they really were trapped. They were set free about ten minutes later and Patarei Prison released its final set of prisoners.

Here is a link for a virtual tour http://www.arvirtuaaltuur.ee/vt/riigiKV/patarei
Bizarrely the people who created it didn’t include the cells, or any of the prisons nastier places.