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Tolli (Toll)
1) Customs, duty; 2) Inch. Clearly the former, named after the Tallinna Tollimaja (Tallinn Customs Building, 1786-1873). Street once known as dwerstrate (1430) suster dwerstrate (1505) (i.e. the street crossing the nun’s street), then apparently nameless until the end of 17th C. At No.8 of this street in 1817, today’s city archives and then the customs house, was the epicenter of Tallinn’s juiciest scandal, a customs fraud involving one Diedrich Rodde III, merchant, lawyer, reluctant Blackhead, passable freemason, US consul, learned alderman, potential mayor and fiscal scallywag. Attempting to alleviate the treasury’s coffers of some 100,000 rubles, somewhat more than the city’s budget, but too little apparently to grease enough palms, and the plot was out. Friends, family and nobles alike were shipped off to Siberia while, inexplicably, Rodde was simply banished to Saaremaa.
Talviku (Talvik)
1) Yellowhammer, Emberiza citrinella, a member of the bunting family. Nominative often talvike, also known (in earlier times perhaps) in vernacular or dialect forms as jõhviklind, (cranberry bird); kadakasass (the parent term kadakasakslane or ‘Juniper German’ indicated an Estonian mimicking higher social-status Germans [see Dominiiklaste, Nurmenuku and Uus-Kalamaja]; from MLG Katesaße – Kate, peasant farmer’s or day-laborer’s hut or cottage + Saße, residence – for cottager or slum- or hovel-dweller); kaerasööja (oat-eater); kollane varblane (yellow sparrow); külmatihane (cold tit); talitsiitsitaja or tsiitsilind (tali=winter, but where the tsiitsi comes from is anybody’s business: unlikely to be from Frisian tsiis for cheese but poss. just reflecting the birdcall). Talvik:talviku is ‘umbellate wintergreen’, Chimaphila umbellata, and, for non-hibernating farmers of the past, a cow born in winter. Part of the Lilleküla bird-name group of streets. See also Tedre.
Karjavärava plats (0)
The 1989 naming of the expanded(?) crossroads between Suur-Karja, Müürivahe and Vana-Posti, some 50-100 m north of the original cattle gate, Karjavärav. Home to Tauno Kangro’s sculpture of the Happy Chimneysweep of 2010. Other historical names include the last vestiges of Russian-language designations prior to the 1991 restoration of independence: Карьявярава площадь (Karyavyarava ploshchad, square) and Михайловская пл (Mikhaylovskaya pl, place) see Karjavärav.
Kärje (Kärg):
Honeycomb. Kärgkonn, Pipa pipa, the Surinam toad (actually a frog) of extraordinary reproductive strategy owes its name to the pits that develop on the female’s back due to its particular form or mating and out of which baby frogs emerge.
