Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom. Tallinn, Estonia

This museum in the center of Tallinn reveals the story of Estonia during the Soviet and Nazi occupations, the restoration of independence, and the importance of preserving it.

Vabamu is the largest private museum in Estonia, whose mission is to share the importance of independence and its fragility. This is the theme of the permanent exhibition “Freedom Without Borders”.

You can explore the exhibition with an audio guide, which is available in different languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and Russian. The exhibition tells the story of Estonia during the Soviet and Nazi occupations, the restoration of independence and the period after it.

As a part of the exhibition, you can discover various items, which all have a personal story to tell, examples of things made in Gulag prison camps, the interior of Soviet housing, short documentaries and much more. An audio guide with voice actors tells real people’s stories recorded from their words. These are the stories of those who were exiled and were unable to return to Estonia, those who successfully returned, those who remained in the country during the regime, etc.

The museum offers several audio guide options: the major one for adults, and a simplified version for children aged 6–12. The children’s version is designed as a dialogue between a child and an adult, with the adult answering the child’s questions. In this way, the museum fulfills its main mission: to explain what freedom is, how hard it is sometimes to achieve, and how important it is to preserve it.

As part of the exhibition, you can also learn about the history of the LGBTQ+ community. Vabamu is the first museum in the Baltics to cover this topic. There is a separate 30-minute audio guide program explaining how the community lived under the USSR and the Nazis, what difficulties they faced, and how they dealt with them.

The museum has a small cafe where you can have a cup of tea or coffee with a dessert while you process what you’ve experienced during the visit.

The museum’s opening hours vary depending on the season. We recommend checking the opening hours on the website: www.vabamu.ee

Stay tuned by following social networks:
www.facebook.com/Vabamu2022
www.instagram.com/vabamu

Tallinn, Estonia