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Kadriorg Park , a large, heavily wooded park a couple of kilometres east from the Old Town, is closely associated with the Russian Tsar Peter the Great, who first visited Tallinn in 1711, the year after Russia conquered Livonia and Estonia from Sweden. The main entrance to the park is at the junction of Weizenbergi tanav and J. Poska (tram #1 or #3 from Viru valjak). Weizenbergi cuts through the park, running straight past Kadriorg Palace (Kadrioru Loss), a Baroque residence designed by the Italian architect Niccolo Michetti, which Peter had built for his wife Catherine (Kadriorg is Estonian for "Catherine's Valley"). These days the palace is the official home of the Museum of Foreign Art (Tues-Sun 11am-6pm; 25EEK), with a highly recommended selection of European art through the centuries. The smaller palace behind it is now home to Estonia's president. While waiting for the palace to be completed Peter lived in a small cottage in the grounds of the park. Today this simple building at the junction of Weizenbergi and Maekalda houses the Peter the Great House Museum (Peeter Esimese Majamuuseum; Mon-Fri 11.30am-5pm, Sat & Sun noon-5.30pm; 6EEK) with furniture from the time Peter lived there, along with a few objects from the palace. Walking down Maekalda from Peter's cottage leads, after around fifteen minutes, to Narva mnt. On the other side of this busy road is the Song Bowl (Lauluvaljak), a vast amphitheatre that's the venue for Estonia's Song Festivals. These gatherings, featuring massed choirs thousands strong, have been an important form of national expression in Estonia since the first all-Estonia Song Festival was held in Tartu in 1869, and are held every two years. The present structure, which can accommodate 15,000 singers (with room for a further 30,000 or so on the platform in front of the stage), went up in 1960. The Song Bowl grounds were filled to capacity for the September 1988 festival which was a significant public expression of longing for independence from Soviet rule, and gave rise to the epithet "Singing Revolution". A tree-lined avenue runs downhill from the amphitheatre to Pirita tee, which runs along the seashore. Turn right here and continue north for 750m to reach Maarjamae Palace (Maarjamae Loss), a neo-Gothic residence built for a Russian count in the 1870s, which looks out over Tallinn Bay at Pirita tee. The building now houses a branch of the History Museum (Ajaloomuuseum; Wed-Sun 11am-5.30pm; 5EEK), covering the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and is far more interesting and imaginative than its city-centre counterpart. The display starts with a section on urban and rural life in nineteenth-century Estonia which includes a few re-created domestic interiors, before moving on to the political and social upheavals of the early twentieth century. Later sections have information on the Molotov-Ribbentrop "secret protocols" which effectively handed the Baltic Republics to Stalin, leading into material about the fate of Estonia during World War II, and the activities of the "Forest Brothers", Estonian partisans who carried on the battle against Soviet occupation into the 1950s. Most exhibits have English captions but the earlier sections are in Estonian and Russian only.
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