Koidula L. (Lydia Koidula, 1843-1886)

Lydia of the Dawn, sobriquet of the bushy-browed Lydia Emilie Florentine Jannsen, Estonian kirjaneitsi (maiden of letters), poet and journalist. Mugshot on 100-krooni note (for information on Estonian currency, see Krooni). Lydia was the right-hand woman of her father Jannsen’s pioneering newspapers under whose name her first poems also appeared. In those days, writing, even poetry, was not a respectable occupation for a young lady. Her collections were later published as the work of ‘Koidula’, the name given her by Jakobson. Koidula articulated emotions that Estonians had bottled up for centuries, and her work retains its potency to this day. Throughout the Soviet Occupation, when singing the national anthem of independent Estonia was forbidden, song festivals great and small ended, whether the censor liked it or not, with her Mu Isamaa on Minu Arm (My Fatherland is My Love) sung to a melody by Gustav Erneseks, as has every All-Estonian Song Festival since 1869. Earliest records (19^th C, date unsure) have the street as Catharinenthalscher Weg (see Kadrioru), mutating to Tihvti in 1885, which would appear to come from tihvt (tack, pin or peg), conceivable due to its proximity to the ‘metals’ sector (see Hõbeda), but no, it was the Estonianization of Ger. Stift (foundation, seminary or, in this instance, home for elderly gentlewomen), for the Estonian Knighthood’s Adeliges Marienstift (St. Mary’s home for impoverished noblewomen at No.23, set up in 1858-60 where, for a modest 500-ruble (₽)* entry fee, beleaguered Baltic bachelorettes could bed and board for a further fee of ₽110 a year. By 1907, the German name was Stiftstr., the Estonians following suit a year later with Stifti, while the Russian camp preferred Институтская (Institutskaya) which in 1921, the Estonians transliterated as both Institudi and Instituudi, revealing once again the perennial perplexity as to the consonance of vowel length. The street’s subsequent, pre-1925 name of plain-and-simple Koidula may have reflected her then intersex status.

* Value in today’s money hard to assess. A 1980 silver-ruble coin contained about 18 g of pure silver, worth on average some $8-10 from 1980-2020.