Names
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 (19th 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.
Köie (Köis)
Rope, cable. After the former rope-making community of Köismäe.
Köismäe (Köismägi) 
Rope hill, named after a former locality of that name specialized in its manufacture, the German equivalent of which is Hamburg’s well-known Reeperbahn meaning “long, open space for rope-making” (MLG rēpærebāne composed of: a) rēpære, sail-maker, from rēp, rope, cord, strand, etc., cf. mod. Ger. Reep (cf. Eng. rope), used only today by sailors, while Seil, a modern term for rope (alongside Tau), from sēl cognate with sēgel, mod Ger. Segel (sail) seems to have shifted meaning from sail to rope, as did ‘sheet’ in Eng. (see Soodi), and b) ‑bahn, which has nothing to do with today’s ‘station’ (although it is the same root) but from MLG bāne, bān meaning “(long/wide), open space” (see Suur-Patarei and Luite). The põik and tee have gone the way of all stone and all that remains is a tower at Laboratooriumi 27 in the old city wall.
Köismäe (Köismägi) torn
Rope hill tower. Standing between Plate and Loewenschede towers and built around 1360, the tower was named after the nearby rope-making industry (see Köismäe).
Kõivu (Kõiv)
Alternative, dialectical and/or Võro* term for Kase (cf. koivu in Finnish, kõuv in Livonian, and koiv in Veps). Counterpart in antiquity to Lõhmuse. Variants include arukõiv (see Arukaskede); marokõiv (see Kase [above]), and sookõiv (see Sookaskede). Tree/shrub group, see Leedri.
* Strictly, Võru, but the ‑o ending is proper to the Võro language/dialect, and was also proposed by Hurt (see Oti) as part of the Estonian language reform (see also Aate) to replace the ‑u ending, but it didn’t catch on.
Kõla (Kõla)
1) Sound, tone, ring, resonance; 2) Weaving-tablet, flat board with holes in the corner used (usually in pairs) in belt-weaving. Next to Sanatooriumi, so maybe the latter for occupational therapy, but probably the former since named same year as Laulu.
