Teeääre (Teeäär)
Street not actually in Tallinn (in Randvere, a Tallinn suburb) but the name’s too good to miss: Teeääre tee: Roadside road, Beside-the-road road! Like most countries, Estonia has its gems. Good examples are the three villages strung out on the road from Tartu to Võru called Karilatsi (herd of children), Ihamaru (storm of lust) and Puskaru (home-made vodka). Sorry to disappoint but Karilatsi probably comes from the names Gerasim or Karl or even karjalane, cowherd, while the 2nd and 3rd are most likely proper names with Aru tacked on. But what about the village in Valgamaa called Litsmetsa, or ‘bitch forest’? Nope, this one too has a less misogynous origin: to start, the second part is uncertain, varying over time from Mattzi (1688), to mötsa (1762) to miti (1922) to modern-day dialect mõtsa, which may all mean mets, or forest, but could just as equally derived from a man’s name, Mats, or something completely different again, and the first part could have indicated ‘wet, silty, compact riverside soil’ or even be derived from Latvian līcis, meaning, among other things, ‘river bend’, or ‘land on a river bend’. It is, after all, only 30-odd km from the Latvian border village of Ape… But all is not lost. In the county of Kanepi (cannabis) – a few km SW of the above-mentioned Puskaru – is the village Soodoma, Sodom, thus named late 19th C, and scattered around the country are a dozen or so places called Junnküla (turdtown, see also Kaasiku) and, until 1977, Hiiumaa had a village called Küla-küla küla, or Village-village village (see also Laiaküla). On the other hand, Teeäär is also an Estonian surname… As is/was, purportedly: Õueaiaäär (which, with a bit of poetic license, could be translated as ‘skirting around the garden’). The story went that, back in the Soviet days, a dashing Estonian travelled the length and breadth of the USSR, seducing ladies with promises of marital bliss then, having divested them of their marketable maritalia, completed the trio by absconding with their savings and jewels. Sadly, reporting the bounder to the police proved impossible, for no-one could spell his name, let alone pronounce it!
