Home
Kullassepa (Kullassepp)
Goldsmith. Known earlier as vicus institoris (1327), platea institorum (1345) or kremerstrate (1389), translated variously as merchants’, grocers’ or haberdashers’ street, this may be artificially upping their game somewhat. The medieval Tallinn concept of Latin institor is not easy to convey. The Roman institor ranged from business manager or agent to anything from shopkeeper to peddler to huckster dealing in merx (merchandise, often from abroad, or mercis sordidae, denarius-store junk). Given the Tallinn trades indicated by property-transfer records in low German and Latin: sutor: mainly cobbler, but most anything sewn; pannicidale: rag merchant; penesticale or hokerboden (from MLG hȫkære, hȫker, etc., retailer, cf. Ger. Höker, stall-holder): seller of staples such as apples, cabbage, onions, salt-fish and other cheap foodstuffs, these were likely on the bottom rung of those with premises. Likewise, judging by the references to bodis institricibus, etc. (institrix is the feminine of institor), a good number of them were women. Their stalls or bodae (from which comes Est. pood, shop) were often of wood (see Raekoja tänav). And yet these often Estonian traders still occupied prime real estate. One suggestion is that they had already been Christianised before the Order arrived, allowing them to maintain stakes already claimed. The street eventually became Kannengeter Strate in the 16th C, after the tinsmiths or pewterers (see Tina), gradually climbing the social (and financial) ladder to silver for brooches, ouches (perhaps ettekenmakeren, see Ehte), and similar embossed work and thence to Goldschmiedestraße in the 18th C, although the Russians continued calling it Серебряная ул. (silver street) until at least 1872.
Lai (Lai)
Broad, wide. One of the oldest streets in Tallinn, with a long list of names to prove it. Initially identified after its salient residents, the nuns: susterstrate (1361), vicus monialium or platea (longa/sancti) monialium, loosely translated as “(holy) enclosed nuns’ (long) high street” (1364-1380), then platea sororum (1480). By the 1600s it was Süsterstraße or Schwestergasse and, in the 18th C (1703), the S switched to C, Cisternstraße, a spelling perhaps influenced by the 17th‑C reforms to the Cistercian movement in La Trappe, France. At some stage, however, contemporary records of Cistern- sonst genandt breitstrasse (Sisters’ - otherwise known as broad street) suggest locals must have become aware of the human side of their angelic nature and that, if nothing else, nuns were still broads...
Krookuse (Krookus)
Crocus. One of the Lilleküla flower-themed streets.