he Padise Monastery possessed a large plot of land and a town house in Vene Street (now: 22 Vene Street) in Tallinn. Every Cistercian monastery had such property in the nearby town, to be used mainly as a storeroom for the crops produced in the monastic lands and marketed later. The property was first mentioned in the written records as early as 1280 as the ownership of the Daugavgrīva Monastery, the predecessor of the Padise Monastery. During the 14th–15th centuries a complex of four smaller buildings was constructed. The facades and the end gables did not face the street as was common in Tallinn, but faced the yard. A long house was aligned along Vene Street. A spacious hall must have occupied the whole of the main floor. The windows of the hall and the main portal with a pointed arch, discovered and exposed in 2007, resemble those of a merchant’s house. The second building from the street is also similar to a merchant’s house because of its size and floorplan: behind the facade there was a diele or a hallway with a mantel chimney, which led to a chamber with a heat storage hypocaust. Further down there were two smaller buildings side by side. We do not know which of them had a chapel, but there was one in every Cistercian town house. The cellars were used to store the goods which had to be preserved in cool, damp conditions and the upper floors served as granaries for storing crops. Stables for horses and other small auxialiary buildings were probably located in the yard. After the dissolution of the monastery the property was in private ownership for a long time. In the 19th century the old monastic building was converted into a schoolhouse, since 1992 the former Cistercian town house in Vene Street has been used by the Old Town Educational College.
