Sokos Hotel Viru
hotel in Tallinn, Estonia
The Original Sokos Hotel Viru is a hotel in Tallinn, Estonia. It was Estonia's first high-rise building and is connected to the Viru Keskus shopping center. It is owned by Sokos Hotels.
History
The Hotel Viru was built by Intourist, the government tourist monopoly of the Soviet Union. It was constructed by the Repo Oy construction company, based in Savonlinna, Finland. Work began in July 1969. However, a fire broke out on the 10th floor of the project in December 1969, and the Finnish company went bankrupt as a result. Another Finnish company, Haka Oy, completed the hotel in May 1972 and the Hotel Viru opened on June 14, 1972.
During the Soviet era, the 23rd floor of the hotel contained a KGB listening center, used to spy on hotel guests. Sixty of the hotel's rooms had concealed espionage devices and some restaurant tables had listening devices.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Sokos Hotel Viru” as hotel in Tallinn, Estonia. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1302999. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sokos Hotel Viru” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.