At first I thought these were hitching rings, but my friend in Tallinn explained that they were in fact used as part of the defense system of the Old Town. Some sort of rope or chain would have been tied from one ring to another one attached to the building […]

I think these are hitching rings near a medieval door in Tallinn’s old town.

A sampling of anchor plates in Tallinn.

A sampling of anchor plates from Riga. I especially like the ones shaped like anchors.

A sampling of guard stones from Riga, Latvia. Btw, cannon are also used as guard stones in Riga.

A sampling of guard stones in Tallinn, Estonia.

I found a few vault lights in Tallinn made by а Russian company before the Russian Revolution. The inscription says: “С.-Петербургское стекольно-промышленное акц. о-во” The St. Petersburg Glass Work Manufacturing Company (Санкт-Петербургское стекольно-промышленное акціонерное общество) existed between 1911 and 1918, but as St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914, it […]

Vault lights are glass prisms set into sidewalks to let light into basements below. I first came across a vault light in Lviv, but I didn’t know what it was until I saw them in Edinburgh and Tallinn and started researching what they were. Hayward Brothers In Edinburgh, I found a […]

n Riga I found a manhole cover dating from 1901. Upon researching it later, I realized it was made by the Swedish company called Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag. Sweden’s first telecom operating company (founded in 1883), Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolaget (Stockholm General Telephone Company) (SAT) installed and operated telephone equipment. The company had […]

An old iron gate in Tallinn. The inscription says “W. Paech in Reval 1868.” Reval was the old name for Tallinn, in use from the 13th century until 1917.  Estonia was part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century; however, Baltic Germans made up the majority of the city’s […]