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Sulevimägi (Sulevimägi)
Sulev’s mountain or hill. Prolongs Olevimägi, with a similar history revolving around nearby Brookusplats. Began its career as de Iseren Doer (1471), tor Iseren Doren (1481), de Iseren Dore (1529) from MLG iser(n) or isen, iron, and could refer to a hypothetical portcullis in an unnamed and no-longer extant tower near the old Russian church (torn vana vene kiriku juures) located some 15 m NNW of where Aia meets Uus. Moving on a century or so, it was renamed auf Thabor (1599) and auf dem Taborsberge (±1700) in reference to the Mount Tabor in Galilee where Jesus got a transfiguration job, then Brockussackgasse (Brockus cul-de-sac, end 18th C), then Kleine Strandstraße (end 18th C), Kleiner Brockusberg or Brokusberg (1907), and diverse permutations of Little Brockus Hill around Väike Brookusmägi in the 1920s until its current renaming in 1935. Interestingly, while German Sackgasse (first recorded early 18th C) may have been influenced by French cul-de-sac, the earliest record of French sac (1307) is some 500 years after old German sac, and although some linguists trace the French back to a possible Arabic زق, zq (wineskin, or impasse), the consensus for both Fr. and Ger. sac and Eng. sack is through Latin saccus and Greek σάκκος (sakkos) along with a Semitic ancestry going all the way back to Akkadian 𒆭𒊓 (saqqu), sack or penitent sackcloth. We are more interconnected than we think.
Tolli (Toll)
1) Customs, duty; 2) Inch. Clearly the former, named after the Tallinna Tollimaja (Tallinn Customs Building, 1786-1873). Street once known as dwerstrate (1430) suster dwerstrate (1505) (i.e. the street crossing the nun’s street), then apparently nameless until the end of 17th C. At No.8 of this street in 1817, today’s city archives and then the customs house, was the epicenter of Tallinn’s juiciest scandal, a customs fraud involving one Diedrich Rodde III, merchant, lawyer, reluctant Blackhead, passable freemason, US consul, learned alderman, potential mayor and fiscal scallywag. Attempting to alleviate the treasury’s coffers of some 100,000 rubles, somewhat more than the city’s budget, but too little apparently to grease enough palms, and the plot was out. Friends, family and nobles alike were shipped off to Siberia while, inexplicably, Rodde was simply banished to Saaremaa.
Vaimu (Vaim)
Spirit, ghost, apparition (also means: mind or mental power, or female farm laborer on corvée duty, the one-time compulsory service on a manor). At first glance, a shortening of ‘holy ghost’, this is not certain; MLG tended to use hillige gēst, etc., for that (see Pühavaimu). Since the earliest records (1694 onwards) give German Spockstraße, it may well be a vestige of Reformation jabs at the Catholic rite (where lengthening the ‘o’ in spȫk was intended to make it sound more foolish?), warping into Spuk-/Spuck- straße/gasse (ghost or revenant street, 1717 on). In 1872, ‘translating’ the German into Russian caused buckets of grief all round: the governor didn’t accept the grotesque Russo-German travesty of Шпуковская (Shpukovskaya), the German already reminiscent more of spitting (spucken) than spookin’ (spuken), and the townspeople, pitchforks in hand, rejected his counter-proposal of Нечистая (Nechistaya, unholy or dirty), so it ended up as Страшная (Strashnaya, Scary or Terrible, in the sense of that which engenders terror) street (1907). The Soviets, anti-superstitious and prosaic to the last, renamed it Vana, Old (1950-1987), see Marta.
