The Tallinn Museum of Orders of Knighthood opened in January 2017, a private institution that found exactly the right home: a medieval merchant's house in the heart of Tallinn's Old Town, contemporary with some of the very orders displayed inside it. The collection focuses on what curators call the wearable awards, the diamond-studded badges and enameled stars that monarchs and republics have used for centuries to mark service, courage, or favor. Three permanent halls cover orders from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East. Specialized exhibitions have included Jewels of Freemasonry in 2020, Treasures from King Street the same year, and a 2019 show marking 800 years of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog, which has its own deep tie to Tallinn through the legendary Battle of Lyndanisse of 1219, the same battle that gave Denmark control of the city in the first place.

Some of the museum's most extraordinary pieces belonged to people whose names define European history. The badge of the Polish Order of the White Eagle worn by Peter the Great, sent in 1712 by Augustus the Strong, sits alongside the neck badge of the Austrian Order of the Golden Fleece worn by Klemens von Metternich, the chancellor who held the Habsburg empire together through three decades of post-Napoleonic crisis. There is the Order of Saint Alexander Nevsky encrusted with 840 diamonds, which Tsar Nicholas II of Russia presented to the future French president Paul Deschanel. And there is the Order of the Starry Cross that belonged to Empress Charlotte of Mexico, the Habsburg-born wife of the doomed Emperor Maximilian, executed in 1867 by Mexican republicans after his short and tragic reign. Charlotte outlived her husband by sixty years, sliding into mental illness and ending her days in a Belgian chateau.

Many of these orders carry founding stories that blur fact and legend. The Order of the Garter, England's highest chivalric honor, was supposedly named for a lady's garter that fell to the floor during a court ball, embarrassing her until King Edward III picked it up, tied it on his own leg, and announced honi soit qui mal y pense, shame to him who thinks evil of it. The Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure traces itself back to the legend of the country's first Emperor. The Order of the Rose of the Empire of Brazil carried perhaps the loveliest motto of any chivalric order ever instituted, Amor e Fidelidade, For Love and Fidelity. The 2021 redesign of the museum's permanent exhibition organized the collection by theme: military orders for battlefield bravery, civil orders awarded in peacetime, science and art decorations, the Red Cross awards, and a separate display dedicated to orders established exclusively for ladies, a tradition reaching back to the 17th century.

Beyond the badges themselves, the museum displays the original robes of the Bavarian Order of St George, the English Order of the Garter, and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the last surviving sovereign chivalric order in Europe with diplomatic ties to over a hundred countries. The presentation cases are themselves works of art, the velvet-lined leather boxes that monarchs commissioned for their gifts often as carefully made as the medals inside. A small scientific laboratory supports research and authentication, and the museum runs an annual summer program for young scholars and would-be curators. In September 2017 it hosted the eleventh European Conference of Phaleristic Societies, the international gathering of specialists in the study of orders and decorations, an academic discipline that goes by the wonderful name phaleristics, after the phalerae worn by Roman officers as battle decorations.

Tallinn's Old Town is a tight medieval cluster on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, packed inside the well-preserved 14th-century city walls. From above, the red-tiled roofs cover an area smaller than many shopping malls, with the Town Hall spire and St. Mary's on Toompea hill rising as the dominant verticals. Kuninga Street runs through the lower town just south of Town Hall Square; the museum sits a short walk from where Hanseatic merchants once weighed their goods and Danish lords once collected their tolls. The whole quarter has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997.