In Renaissance Tallinn – then known by its German name, Reval, since the city was inhabited by German burghers, while the Estonians, the Undeutsche, could live here only as servants without civic rights – so, in Reval, this tidy German town, the city council issued a decree: when the clock strikes nine, you must stand up in the tavern – and mind you, this was long before Covid! Anyone caught drinking after nine had to pay double, and so did the innkeeper.
But which nine o’clock? The city had four clock towers, and given how unreliable clocks were at the time, as much as an hour could pass between the first and the last nine o’clock chime. So the drinkers could argue with the city guards inspecting the taverns that, say, St. Nicholas’s bell meant nothing to them – they swore by St. Olaf’s instead. In response, in 1636 the council asked the four churches to sign a contract with the clockmaker Greiger Richter to maintain and synchronize the four mechanisms. To underline their intent, they also commissioned the Königsberg-born Christian Ackermann, a free master of the city, clockmaker and woodcarver, to create a splendid decorative clock next to the gate of the 
Church of the Holy Spirit, which served as the council’s official chapel. From then on, this clock showed the official time in Reval. Of course, it wasn’t exactly accurate either. But Ackermann also installed a sundial beside it, and the contracted clockmaker adjusted the clock daily based on that. The sun, after all, doesn’t lie.
Until the day came when even the sun did. With the introduction of time zones in the 19th century, local-time sundials became inaccurate. The sundial disappeared from the wall, and only Ackermann’s decorative clock remains to this day. It no longer runs – which means it tells the exact time twice a day.
The tower of the Church of the Holy Spirit is so tall that you can’t fit it into a single frame from the window of the Great Guild Hall across the street. Here you can see the decorative clock; the bell tower appears in the photo below, taken from the tower of the town hall.
Sights of Tallinn’s Old Town. The larger red dots mark places I’ve also written posts about. The Church of the Holy Spirit stands just north of the main central market square.
The Church of the Holy Spirit, however, holds more than just this one remarkable historical feature. In the chancel of the church, which became Lutheran in 1525, stands the magnificent Pentecost winged altarpiece from 1483, produced in the workshop of Lübeck’s Bernt Notke. The wealth of late medieval Reval is evident from the fact that a dozen such splendid winged altarpieces have survived in the city. And not only from major German workshops, but from the most elite centers of the late Gothic as well: Bruges, the city of Jan van Eyck, and Brussels. Most of them can now be seen in St. Nicholas’ Church, which has been turned into a museum.
After the change of confession, the church continued to grow, with painted galleries and gallery consoles shaped like human figures, epitaphs, and a finely carved pulpit. During this period, from 1566 until his death in 1600, the church’s pastor was Balthasar Russow, who in 1578 wrote the great chronicle of the Baltic provinces—and who later became the protagonist of the greatest Estonian novelist Jaan Kross’s major work, the three-volume Between Three Plagues.
The most unusual object, however, is found on the column closest to the entrance: a Danish flag with a white cross on a red field.
So how on earth did that get here, into an Estonian church?
There’s quite a story behind it.
Danish and other Scandinavian merchants had been coming to Estonia for centuries, as it offered the most convenient gateway toward the Novgorod markets rich in valuable furs. Naturally, they soon began wondering how to get rid of the harbour and road tolls imposed by local Estonian rulers. And the answer, just as naturally, came in the form of conquest.
The Estonian principalities and castles before the conquest
The conquest found a good pretext at the beginning of the 13th century, when crusaders returning from the Holy Land—then under pressure from the Saracens—suggested that instead of fighting distant pagans in the East, it might be more practical to bring the “religion of love” by force to the pagan peoples of Eastern Europe nearby. They even offered their weapons for the task. Pope Honorius III approved the mission.
In 1219, northern German and southern Scandinavian rulers advanced from two directions against the Baltic pagans: from the north, King Valdemar II of Denmark and Archbishop Anders Sunesen of Lund with Danish, German, and Wendish (northern Slavic) troops; from the south, German crusaders. In early June the Danes reached the harbour of Lindanise (today Tallinn), landed, and set up camp on the hill rising above the shore. The Estonians called this camp Taani-linn, “Danish castle,” which is where the city’s modern Estonian name comes from. The hill later received the German name Domberg, adapted by Estonians as Toompea—the administrative centre of the city for centuries.
The so-called King’s Garden of Denmark on the eastern edge of Toompea, where the miracle of the flag allegedly took place
Skirmishes followed between Danes and Estonians, which the Estonians used to gather as large an army as possible from the surrounding regions. Finally, on June 15, they attacked the Danish camp from five sides. The defenders began to falter and were close to defeat. Archbishop Anders fell to his knees in prayer. And just as the Estonians were about to break into the fortress, a flag suddenly fell from the sky—red with a white cross. The sight of the miracle gave the defenders renewed strength; they defeated the attackers and, in the following months, subjugated northern Estonia, establishing the Duchy of Estonia under the Danish crown. This is the birth of the Danish flag, the Dannebrog, considered the oldest national flag in the world, still celebrated in Denmark every year.
C. A. Lorentzen: The Dannebrog falling from the sky (1809), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; and the same scene on a late 19th-century Copenhagen cigar box
The earliest known depiction of the Dannebrog on the coat of arms of King Valdemar IV (1370)
Of course, the story has its precursors: Constantine the Great’s vision of the cross in the sky with the words “In this sign you will conquer,” and, closer in time, the red flag with a white cross of the crusader Godfrey of Bouillon, believed to contain the power that helped him defeat the Saracens.
But why is the banner of the conquerors displayed in a church in free Estonia?
Danish rule in Estonia did not last long. The invaders fell out over the spoils, and the Teutonic Order increasingly threatened Danish Baltic holdings from the south. In 1332 a succession crisis broke out in Denmark, and in the resulting uncertainty the Danes did what any sensible merchant does before bankruptcy: they sold their Estonian territories to the Teutonic Order. For the next six hundred years, the Germans became the ruling power, to such an extent that it was even written into law that Estonians—Undeutsche—could not hold office, nor even obtain citizenship or guild membership. From the early 18th century, Russian imperial rule joined in. The new oppressors gradually erased the memory of the old ones. So much so that when Estonia became independent in 1920, the Danish government, in the spirit of Baltic solidarity, donated a Danish flag to Tallinn—the city where the flag was said to have been born—and it was proudly raised in the council church.
Kræsten Iversen: The Battle of Lyndanisse (1935), Bornholm Art Museum
Danish volunteers during the Estonian War of Independence (1920)
Then from 1940 came new occupiers—the Soviets, the Germans, and then the Soviets again. None of them had any fondness for the Danish flag. The council managed to hide the relic in time, and the Soviets searched intensively for it, arresting many people in connection with it—but in vain. The flag remained hidden until Estonia’s renewed independence, adding another chapter to the long history of concealed relics from the Soviet era, such as the story of the Hasidim of Uman, who hid the coffin of their miracle rabbi Nachman of Breslov during the Soviet invasion of 1920 and kept it concealed in private homes despite constant persecution until Ukraine’s independence in 1990. Estonia regained independence in the same year, and the Danish flag was brought out of hiding and ceremonially raised again in the Church of the Holy Spirit.
In the spirit of Baltic solidarity, Dannebrog ceremonies have been held in Tallinn several times since then, most spectacularly in 1994, when four Danish paratroopers descended with a huge flag from ten thousand metres directly onto the site of the legendary miracle.
Dannebrog descent ceremony on Valdemar Day in Copenhagen
Thus the flag of a former conqueror became a symbol of Estonian freedom—won at great cost.
The Dannebrog, which became part of Tallinn’s coat of arms, on the panel of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in Bernt Notke’s altarpiece (1483) in the Church of the Holy Spirit
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