Old Dorpat in 1889

In 1889, a unique portfolio was compiled in memory of the Dorpat Teachers' Seminary. It contains 61 photographs in sepia tones showing the city of Dorpat/Tartu. They are views of streets, people, houses, churches, bridges and monuments. They show the Embach/Emajögi River, which dominates the cityscape, the Cathedral Hill and the ‘Heidelberg of the North’ – the University of Dorpat, which was still German-speaking at that time. As an outstanding educational institution between West and East, it became the ‘Imperial University of Yuriev’ in 1893 and is also the birthplace of the Estonian and Latvian national movements in the Russian Empire, to which Dorpat belonged at that time as part of the Baltic province of Livonia. At the time the photographs were taken, the city had a population of approximately 36,000. In 1881, Estonians already made up around 55 per cent of the population, with Germans accounting for 35 per cent, a figure that was declining. The images therefore also document a city in transition. The early photographs of the city of Dorpat were taken by the Carl Schulz photo studio. The founder of the same name advanced his business through innovative photographic techniques in the 1870s. In particular, his focus on architectural and landscape photography made his studio the leading provider of cityscapes in Dorpat beyond his death in 1884.

Under his son Arthur, who reopened a branch of the company headquarters in Dorpat in 1886 after it had been relocated to Riga, the range of photographs was renewed. It can be assumed that he was the photographer of many of the images in the portfolio ‘Memories of Dorpat 1889’ shown here, even though some of the motifs contained therein were already offered in the studio's advertisements in 1871 and could therefore have been taken by his father. The studio played a prominent role in the history of photography in Estonia. Of all the photo shops in the country, it was run under one name for the longest time. It existed from 1857 to 1935 and witnessed the official change of the city's name from Dorpat to Jurjew and finally to Tartu.