The Maarjamäe complex spreads across a slope above the sea east of the centre: a tall concrete obelisk, long ceremonial stairs, walled terraces and open platforms, laid out from the 1960s onward as a Soviet memorial landscape rather than a single monument.
It was built to be processed through — the whole site assumes a crowd moving in formation — and it is now almost always empty, which changes the experience completely. Concrete that was designed to be seen behind thousands of people reads very differently with nobody in front of it. Part of the complex has been given over to a memorial to the victims of communism.