Tallinn Gate
Begin where travellers once left Pärnu for the north. The Tallinn Gate is a gate in the old earth ramparts, and from here a bridge crossed the moat to the postal road towards Tallinn. Walk into the tunnel and look up: a barrel vault almost five metres wide and close to seven metres high spans the straight passage. Heavy double doors could close it at both ends, and a portcullis once hung in the middle. The walls are fieldstone and brick, faced on the outside with porous dolomite from Riga.
Until 1710 it carried a royal name, the King's Gate or Carl Gustav Gate. In the second half of the 17th century the Swedish crown rebuilt Pärnu as a bastioned fortress, and the town grew threefold to the south. Three gates pierced the earthworks: the Riga Gate, this one, and a Water Gate down to the river. The drawings came from Paul von Essen, a Swedish fortification engineer who worked with Erik Dahlberg, later Governor General of Livonia. Similar King's Gates and bastions went up in Narva and Riga in the same era.
The Swedes named their bastions after heavenly bodies: Venus, Saturn, Mars, Luna, Jupiter, Mercury and Sol. This gate sat in the wall between Mercury and Luna, guarded in front by an outwork called the Evening Star; the Riga Gate had its Morning Star. When the fortress was pulled down in the 1860s, the moat was destroyed and the bastions levelled. Only this gate was kept, together with the ramparts and the moat running from here to the Venus bastion by the river, which is the stretch of water you see today.
The gate is free and always open, so take your time on the rampart side too. From here it is 330 m, about 5 minutes, to Eliisabeti Church.
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