Тарту хотын соёлын төвийн бүтээн байгуулалтын талбайгаас түүхийн үнэт олдворууд илэрлээ

Before Tartu can build its new cultural center, the ground under the construction site has to give up what it’s hiding, and it’s doing so at a remarkable pace. In a single week of digging in Estonia’s university city, archaeologists pulled out a rusted sword, a medieval knife with its wooden handle still attached, and a piece of glazed ceramic carrying the face of a Swedish queen.

One find stood out from the rest, even though it’s barely bigger than a fingernail. It’s a tiny metal letter, cast backwards, that may once have helped print some of the very first texts ever produced in Tartu.

A Week of Finds Under the Future Siuru

Digging ran from November 2 to 6, 2026, carried out by the archaeology firm OÜ Arheox with support from the Tartu City Museum, and the city has been posting the results in a public excavation diary. The site is the future Siuru Cultural Centre, in Tartu’s Keskpark (Central Park), on the left bank of the Emajõgi River and close to the Old Town. Once finished, the center will bring several of Tartu’s cultural institutions together in one venue, including the Tartu Art Museum and the Central Library.

Getting down to the past takes patience. The archaeological layer begins about 2.5 meters down and is 1.6 to 2.5 meters thick. Digging may reach 5 meters, and the layer is excavated by hand. Tartu was one of the most important trade and settlement centers of Livonia in the Middle Ages, and that long history is why objects from different periods turn up in the same excavation area. Archaeologists have to date each object by the layer it came from.

Most dramatic of all is the sword. It’s a corroded iron weapon with a long blade and a surviving hilt, and archaeologists haven’t yet established its precise date. A separate metal fragment may be the tip of a scabbard or another cutting tool. It could be early modern or modern, but nothing links it to the sword.

Alongside the weapon came a humbler survivor. A knife from the Middle Ages still has its wooden handle, which is rare because wood usually rots away long before iron does. It’s the kind of everyday tool someone in medieval Tartu would have reached for without a second thought.

A Tiny Letter From Tartu’s First Printing Press

Small enough to lose in a coat pocket, the printing type is lead-based and measures about 25 millimeters long and 6 millimeters high, which matches early modern printing types. It’s a lowercase italic “h”, cast in reverse, with grooves that helped typesetters orient the letters. Each letter was set into lines of text by hand, one at a time.

Nothing like it had turned up in Estonia before. “To my knowledge, early modern letter printing types have not previously been found in Estonia,” said Arvi Haak, head of archaeology at the Tartu City Museum. The only comparable finds are three oblong reglets, blank spacers placed between lines of type, from Tallinn. By contrast, more than 2,700 such types are known from Wittenberg in Germany.

The letter’s most likely home is the first printing press of the University of Tartu. The print shop opened in Tartu in 1632, together with the new university, and the earliest known Tartu imprint is Jacob Becker’s Postordnung, dated September 28, 1632. Its daily work was mainly Latin academic texts, printed in roman type with italics for emphasis.

Meelis Friedenthal, a book historian at the university, notes that the italic “h” resembles the letters in Swedish-era prints, which points to a 17th-century origin and the university’s own stock of type.

War nearly wiped that press out. When Russian troops took Tartu in 1656, the university fled to Tallinn and left its equipment behind. After the 1661 Treaty of Kärde, the equipment was hidden in the vault of St. Mary’s Church. With its cases it weighed 3,564 pounds, and when the university reopened in the late 1600s, printer Johann Brendeken sent worn type to Lübeck to be recast.

This particular “h” never made that trip. The print shop stayed close to the university buildings in the Old Town, and the letter probably ended up thrown out with the rubbish.

A Swedish Queen on a Stove Tile

The most decorative find was a fragment of a green-glazed ceramic stove tile with a relief portrait of Queen Maria Eleonora, wife of King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden, dating to the first half of the 17th century. The royal connection fits the city well, because Gustav II Adolf founded the University of Tartu in 1632, when Tartu was part of the Swedish kingdom.

Tiled stoves were more than a way to keep warm. Early modern stoves often carried portraits of monarchs, dynastic coats of arms and religious scenes. These decorations signaled social status and political and cultural identity, especially in wealthy homes. A queen’s face glowing above the fire was a way to show off both.

Another royal face turned up in the same dig. A second green-glazed tile fragment shows Duke Johann Albrecht II of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, so European dynastic portraits evidently decorated Tartu interiors. Researchers haven’t determined which buildings the tiles came from or why their owners chose these figures.

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