The "Great Fire" of Tartu occurs in…
1775 CE
It starts in the backyard of Knights Street (Rüütli tänav) near St. John's Church.
A strong wind allows the fire to spread from building to building, and the wooden bridges allow the fire to cross the river to do further damage.
Nearly two hundred wooden buildings are destroyed and over forty stone buildings.
The city is further damaged when eighteen buildings are purposefully destroyed to create fire breaks.
At the end of the fire only one hundred and sixty buildings remain: most of these are to the north of the city.
There are only forty left standing in the former center of the city.
Uppsala House, which is near St. John's church, will claim to be one of the few buildings now remaining that date from before the fire.
Some of its timbers have been dated to 1750.
Following the fire the city begins rebuilding.
The rules that had required that there be no new stone buildings are reversed and it is now required to construct not only new buildings but also fences and outbuildings without using wood.
Catherine the Great finds twenty-five thousand rubles to ease the situation in Tartu after the fire, and the money is used to build a stone bridge across the river.
The remains of this bridge can still be seen beneath the river Emajõgi but the main part of the bridge will be destroyed during the Second World War.
Tartu had lost most of its major stone buildings when they were blown up in September 1708 on the orders of Peter the Great during the Great Northern War.
The Russian tsar had ordered that the buildings in Tartu (then called Dorpat) should be mined to prevent the Swedes from using the town as a military base.
This was just one of the sieges which Tartu was subjected to during its history, but this time the city had been left burning and in ruins.
When the war finished, the population had returned to Tartu, and the desperate need for houses had created an abundance of new wooden buildings.
The buildings had to be built of wood as the Tsar had laid orders that no stone buildings were to be built anywhere except in the new Russian capital St. Petersburg.
The first large fire had occurred in 1763.
The following year Catherine the Great had visited, and some rebuilding had taken place.
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