Dating to the 14th century, Padise Monastery was built and occupied by Cistercian monks. The King of Denmark offered the monks this location to establish a new home after they were forced from their original home near Riga. The monks sustained the monastery until the early 1500s when it entered a period of decline culminating in its takeover by Sweden in 1561. Over the next twenty years the Swedes and Russians alternated control of the complex. Eventually the King of Sweden awarded it to the Burgermeister of Riga whose family controlled it for the next three hundred years up to 1919 when it was appropriated as a function of Estonia’s first independence.

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