Permanent home sought for shoes recovered from Konstantin Päts’s grave

A permanent and appropriate home is being sought for shoes recovered during the 1990 reburial of Estonian President Konstantin Päts, ERR reported. The shoes had been kept for decades in a safe at Tallinn University’s archaeological collection.

Archaeologist Ants Kraut said the shoes were found when Päts’s remains were exhumed from a hospital cemetery near Tver on June 22, 1990. They had been put on Päts after his death in hospital for his burial.

“We collected everything that had remained, as archaeologists traditionally do, and took it with us. Very little of the coffin’s contents had survived,” Kraut said. Pieces of fabric and buttons were also found.

The shoes were not placed in the grave when Päts was reburied at Tallinn’s Metsakalmistu cemetery in October 1990.

After the archaeological collection was moved, Kraut and a group of archaeologists removed the items from the safe. He displayed the shoes last Friday at the annual meeting of the Järvamaa Museum Friends Society in Paide. Presidential candidate Maive Rute also attended the event.

“It was a very emotional moment today,” Rute wrote on social media, describing the items as Päts’s footwear. She said the shoes had been put on the president in hospital instead of hospital slippers to provide a somewhat more dignified burial.

Kraut considers the Museum of Estonian Heads of State a suitable permanent location, but said it would need greater state support and appropriate premises.

“The Estonian state could have a museum of this kind,” he said.

Päts’s great-great-grandson, Madis Päts, said the preservation of the shoes came as a surprise. Although he is not familiar with archaeological practices, he said he believed the shoes should have been left in the grave during the reburial.

Madis Päts’s daughter questioned whether it was appropriate to remove a person’s final shoes from their grave, keep them for more than 30 years and then display them publicly.

Literary scholar Aare Pilv also raised questions about the shoes’ earlier whereabouts and whether they had been stored according to museum-object requirements. In a social media post, he alleged that Kraut had kept the shoes in his possession and at home for more than 30 years before presenting them publicly.

Konstantin Päts died in 1956 at a psychiatric hospital near Kalinin, now Tver. His remains were found in 1990 and reburied at Metsakalmistu in Tallinn later that year.