![Pastureland lighthouse complex ca 1910. Jaan Vali collection.](https://www.etts.ee/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/laidunina-2.jpg)
Laidunina former lighthouse is located on the southeastern coast of Saaremaa on the Kahtla isthmus, and was originally intended for orientation in the northern part of the Gulf of Riga. The lighthouse was built in the historicist style according to a type design by the military engineer Aleksandr Jaron, who is known to have been involved in lighthouse construction at the time. The first floor is of stone with a hexagonal plan, the rounded top is of red brick. The façade is adorned with dolomitic window sills and a cornice supported on cantilevered arches.
The 26-metre lighthouse, with a complex of service buildings including a superintendent's dwelling, guardhouse, sauna, barn, kerosene shed, cellar, well and enclosure garden, was completed by 1907. The lantern room was fitted with a stage III dioptric apparatus, which was 27 m above sea level and visible for 11 miles.
![Drawing of Laidunina lighthouse 1925. Collections of the Estonian Maritime Museum.](https://www.etts.ee/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/laidunina-3.jpg)
![Laidunina lighthouse circa 1910. Jaan Vali collection.](https://www.etts.ee/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/laidunina-1.jpg)
After some time, it became clear that the lighthouse had been wrongly sited and its equipment was relocated to a wooden lighthouse built on the Kübassaare peninsula. Legend has it, however, that the lighthouse was originally intended to be built on Kübassaari, and that the tsarist master builder had simply got the location wrong.
In 1920 the lighthouse and the service buildings were put back into operation and the lighthouse showed its light until 1924. It was later used as a day marker until it was removed from the navigation marker database in 2004. To this day, the best-preserved part of the lighthouse is the ornate stone and brick structure, whose dilapidated concrete spiral staircase is said by locals to have once been the site of a village man's sheep falling down the stairs to the top of the tower, which angered the man and caused the stairs to be blown away. The outbuildings include a cellar, which has now been repaired, a fuel storage shed and the walls of a barn. Of the remaining buildings, only the foundations remain, as most of them were demolished for building materials in the late 1920s.
Although the building has been removed from the list of maritime monuments, it is one of the most decorative in its architectural design and use of materials and as such remains a landmark. Being exceptional among lighthouses, Laidunina is also protected as an architectural monument. The Laidunina Lighthouse is looked after by the NGO Laidunina Lighthouse Society.