TALLINN, a seaport of Estonia, the capital of the republic, in 59° 26' N., 24° 46' E., on a bay in the south coast of the Gulf of Finland. Pop. 137,792. Vessels drawing 3o ft. can enter or leave the port and lie alongside the quays. There are floating docks and shipbuilding and repairing yards. The chief exports are textiles, cereals, timber, paper, and Portland cement, and the imports foodstuffs, cotton and coal. There are electric cranes and four ice-breakers. The town has textile, paper, cement, and timber industries; an International Industrial Fair is held annually in June. The grey towers topped with red tiles, the narrow cobbled streets, the remains of the castle and the city walls give the town an attractive appearance and it is devel oping as a tourist centre. It was formerly called Reval.
A Danish settlement on the high Silurian crag known as the Domberg existed in 1093, and the Danish king Valdemar II. built a castle in 1219, captured by the Livonian Knights in 1228, but returned to the Danes in 1237. Merchants from Liibeck and
Bremen settled here in the 13th century and it became a port of the Hanseatic League. It was fortified early in the 14th century, and in 1343 sustained a siege by the revolted Estonians. Valde mar III. sold Reval and Estonia to the Teutonic Knights in 1346, but on the dissolution of the order, in 1561, Estonia and Reval surrendered to the Swedish king Erik XIV. A great conflagration in 1433, the pestilence of 1532, the bombardment by the Danes in 1569, and the Russo-Livonian War, destroyed its trade. The Russians besieged Reval in 1570 and 1577, and in 1710 it was sur rendered to Peter the Great, who immediately began the erection of a military port for his Baltic fleet. His successors continued to fortify the access to Reval from the sea, large works being undertaken, especially in the early years of the 19th century. It passed from Russian to Estonian rule in 1918.