Tõnismägi (0)

St Anthony’s mountain or hill. Odd: this, the street, unspecified by type (tänav, tee, etc.) is in the nominative (see Kollane) while the District (Tõnismäe) is genitive, and ‘should’ be switched. The actual Tõnismägi hill/mountain itself is nominative and fine as it rises through the clouds to the vertiginous height of 30.9 m above sea level depending on the thickness of your soles. On a clear day, you can see the Latvian Consulate, after whose capital the street was known in 1885 (same year the name Tõnismägi was recorded) Рижская гора (Rizhskaya gora), Riga mountain, its vertex being in the courtyard somewhere. Other names have included Tönnis mäggi (old Est.) or Tönnis-Berg (Esto-Ger. both 1732), Antonisberg (1907), Sankt-Antonis-Berg, etc. Here, too, the subconscious Estonian Angst about the size of its mountains claims that Tõnismägi used to be much higher until the damn Swedes turned up and forced the local peasants to hack off its lofty crags as building material for city earthworks. Interested parties may rejoice in the knowledge that St Anthony was the patron saint of pigs, often represented as one of his temptations (whether for the consumption or creation of bacon therewith remains obscure) but more likely a distortion of his dismissal of the devil, another cloven-footed character of equally unkosher qualities. See Mäe for discussion (of hills, not pigs). Not to be confused with Tõnis Mägi (also hills, not pigs) (b. 1948), singer & pop musician.