Paljassaare (Paljassaar)

Bare, bleak island. Paljassaar is as much peninsula, District, road, harbor, bird reserve as host to Tallinn’s primary sewage plant with 20 settling tanks and 200,000 m² of sludge-drying beds. It was also, 10,000 years ago, not even there. Neither was Tallinn. Kopli began appearing about 4-5000 years ago, and Paljassaar only came into existence a 100-odd years ago, emerging first from two islands, Suur-Karli and Väike-Karli, or der große Karl and der kleine Karl (big & little ‘Charles’, they say, a point to which we will return). About 2000 years ago, Kopli was half peninsula and half island, and Paljassaar was represented by maybe half an inch of Suur-Karli, at low tide. One thousand years later, Kopli had grown into a fully-formed peninsula and Väike-Karli was a few hundred meters long, which sort of explains the name. Perhaps the earliest depiction of the islands was the fanciful map of Livonia of unknown authorship in the 16-17^th C, but misplaced and located off the coast of Lithuania. Waxelberg’s map of 1688 has none, and one year later Woltemate’s map of 1689 shows the islands by name only, without even the hint of an outline, while Holmberg’s, also 1689, shows 2 main islands, one named Kahl* the other barely legible, maybe Holmar, each perhaps 200m² with a string of 3 islets heading SW. By the time von Franckenberg copied Woltemate in 1726, they had increased in size with sandbanks stretching nearly all the way to Kopli). In 1865, the General Karte der Stadt Reval presents an almost complete union of the two islands into a single unit, perhaps connected by sandbanks or shoals, of about 2km² about 300 m from the mainland and by the time the Russian military mapped Tallinn in 1900 the peninsula had formed, although extensively sandy on the eastern coast of Paljassaare laht (bay). Lastly, since tectonic activity continues (see Liiva) and the peninsula is surging upwards at the exhausting rate of approx. 2.4 mm per year (but perhaps confounded by the corresponding rise in sea level of about 1.8 mm / year over the past 500 years) we may even see a mountain one day (according to Estonian conditions [see Mäe], in about 83,000 years)... Don’t wait, Switzerland offers better skiing.

* Getting there!...