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A sugar bakery stood on this corner of Pikk and Pühavaimu streets by 1806. The house that holds Estonia’s oldest working café took its present form under the confectioner Georg Stude, and its façade and interiors are a protected monument.
At a glance
Maiasmokk (“sweet tooth”) occupies the ground floor of a yellow corner house in Tallinn’s lower town, where Pikk street meets Pühavaimu. Confectioners have worked on this plot since at least 1806. In the 1870s the Stude family joined two older houses into the building seen today, and made it the home of a marzipan and confectionery business that supplied the Russian imperial court. The façade and the historicist interiors are entered in the Estonian register of cultural monuments. The café still trades here, beside a small marzipan room run by the Kalev company.
Key facts
- Where: Pikk 16 / Pühavaimu 1, Vanalinn (Old Town), Tallinn, Estonia
- Monument: Estonian Register of Cultural Monuments no. 8518, Elamu fassaad ja historitsistlikud interjöörid (façade and historicist interiors of the dwelling house), dated 1876
- Rebuilding: two older houses joined into one for Georg Stude, to a design by Nikolai Thamm the Elder (1834–1907)
- Earliest record: sale of the plot to the sugar baker Lorenz Cavietzel, 11 August 1806
- Setting: within the Historic Centre (Old Town) of Tallinn, UNESCO World Heritage Site
- Current use: Maiasmokk café and the Kalev marzipan room
- Coordinates: 59.438362, 24.745694 · open in Google Maps
History
The first confectioner on the corner was Lorenz Cavietzel. A contract of 11 August 1806 gave the sugar baker the rights to the land and to the house whose ground floor is today the café’s sales room. Under the Russian town law of 1786 only guild members could keep a business in Tallinn, and his name appears for the first time in that deed. His son carried on the trade from 1823; later owners were Johann Seegrön and then Conrad Raeper.
The house took its present shape under Georg Stude, a confectioner from Narva. Estonian accounts place his purchase of the old confectionery and of the two-storey house next to it, on the corner of Pikk and Pühavaimu, in 1875–1876; the café itself dates its beginning to 1864. Stude had the architect Nikolai Thamm the Elder rebuild the two houses as one large building for his business, and the monument register dates the façade and interiors to 1876. Stude’s marzipan made the firm’s name: in the second half of the nineteenth century it was supplied to the Russian imperial family and court. According to the café, the rooms had acquired by 1913 the look they keep today, with red-wood counters and display cases decorated in bronze and a rare painted glass ceiling.
Georg Ferdinand Stude took over from his father in 1912. The business was nationalised under Soviet rule and merged into what became the Kalev confectionery factory, while cakes continued to be made on Pikk street. Between 1977 and 1984 the rooms were adapted as the Maiasmokk café-confectionery, to a project by the architect Tiina Linna with interiors by Aala Buldas. Kalev took a majority share in the café company in 2004 and in late 2010 bought the building itself from the city at auction.
What you see
The front in the photograph is a narrow, three-bay face of three storeys, rendered in a warm yellow and scored with horizontal bands from the ground up, with the mouldings picked out in white. On the first floor the two outer windows sit under curved pediments, while the middle window is framed by flat pilaster strips. The top-floor windows are round-headed, and the central one opens onto a small balcony with a scrolled wrought-iron railing. A bracketed cornice runs round the house, and above it rises a curved gable with scrolled sides and a single round-headed window, crowned by a weathervane.
At street level the entrance is a dark wooden double door under a hanging lantern, with the sign of the marzipan room over it and carved brackets on either side. Two shop windows under dark awnings, one lettered Kalev, flank the door. The front is modest in scale and very even in its detailing, in keeping with the historicism of the 1870s. The register protects the interiors as well as the front, so the counters and ceilings inside are part of the monument.
Practical information
- The ground floor is a working café and shop, open to the public; the protected interiors can be seen by anyone who goes in.
- The Kalev marzipan room in the same building shows old Stude packaging and marzipan figures cast in historic moulds.
- Pikk street is a narrow cobbled street of the Old Town; wear flat shoes.
- Allow a few minutes for the front, half an hour if you sit down inside.
Getting there
The house is in the lower town of Tallinn’s Old Town, a few minutes’ walk north of Town Hall Square along Pühavaimu street. The Old Town is walkable from the passenger port and from Balti jaam, the main railway station, which lies north-west of Toompea hill. Tallinn Airport is about four kilometres south-east of the centre.
Nearby
- Church of the Holy Spirit, diagonally opposite across Pühavaimu street.
- The Great Guild Hall on Pikk street, home of part of the Estonian History Museum.
- Historic Centre of Tallinn, the UNESCO-listed Old Town around it.
Sources
- Estonian Register of Cultural Monuments (Kultuurimälestiste register), monument no. 8518, Elamu fassaad ja historitsistlikud interjöörid Pikk t. 16 / Pühavaimu t. 1, 1876. a. The register page could not be opened during our research; the entry title and number are given as cited by et.wikipedia and Wikidata (Q55876697).
- Kohvik Maiasmokk, the café’s own history: the 1806 confectionery, the 1864 founding date, the 1913 interiors, the 1984 name, the 2010 purchase.
- Andrus Allika, “Eesti Post annab välja postmargi Eesti kondiitritööstus 200”, ERR, 17 May 2006, and Pekka Erelt, “Martsipani Georgi maiuseäri”, Eesti Ekspress, 28 October 2004, as cited by et.wikipedia for the 1806 deed and the Cavietzel and Stude owners.
- et.wikipedia, Pikk tänav and Maiasmoka kohvik; en.wikipedia, Maiasmokk and Nikolai Thamm Sr.: the Thamm rebuilding, the 1977–1984 adaptation, the Kalev ownership.
- OpenStreetMap / Nominatim for the position («Maiasmokk, 16, Pikk, Vanalinn»).
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