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Sakala (Sakala)
Former province in southern Estonia, dating back to 12th century. Title of Estonian language newspaper daily first published in Viljandi in 1878 by Jakobsoni C.R.. Street name replaced present-day Pärnu (formerly Väike-Pärnu maantee [1908-1936], and Veike-Pärnu uulits [1885]) in 1936, and flirted (1959-1960) with Ugandi, the name (oddly, never used before or since) of a one-time independent country in the region of present-day SE Estonia with the eminently unpronounceable MLG designation of Uggn. But then again its synonym Ugala was used elsewhere instead.
Tatari (Tatar) 
Tatar, Tartar. Name derived from the Tatar settlement known as Татарская Слобода (Tatarskaya Sloboda, Est. Tatari asum) built by Peter I to settle Tatar naval officers after the Great Northern War (1700-1721) and first recorded as Tatarskoi-Slobod-Straße (18th C). Historically, a слобода (sloboda) was a settlement exempt from certain obligations, but see Vana Slobodaa.
Roosikrantsi (Roosikrants)
Rosary, from rose plus (Ger. Kranz) chaplet, crown or wreath, but also the name of a Danish dynasty of Hanseatic merchants. Renamed (1944?-1989) as Lauristini J. during the Soviet occupation. Next door to Hariduse, and various interpretations have been put forward: there used to be a place of execution called Rosenkranz nearby; criminals used to tell their rosaries on the way to becoming debeaded; a Michel Rosenkrans bought some land nearby in 1643. Similarly, being close to a St-Barbara cemetery resulted in its being named Barbarastraße for a few hundred years (1575±25-1800±25), and another name was Kummerstraße, street of sorrow (1813). The result of all this is the perfect haze for popular etymology and wishful thinking. Research needed. There were actually two Roosikrantsi streets, a greater and a lesser. Enlarged, the latter later resulted in part of today’s Pärnu.
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.







