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Viige (?)
Old farm name. As to actual meaning?... Viiga and Viigi are recorded as forenames in the Tartu region. Plenty for viik:viigi: fig (not that common in the Tropics of Vismeistri), draw or tie, tapeworm, and crease. Another dialectal meaning of viik:viigi is bay or cove, which makes vague sense, the street is roughly between Kakumäe and Kopli bays, about 2 & 1 km respectively, but still i not e. Wiedemann has wigl/wiglas:wigla for pitchfork (with more than 2 prongs); and wigle:wigle for godwit or snipe; so lots of straw-clutching but little concrete which is hardly the best choice when you’re sinking anyway… Last shot: I’ll suggest an unrecorded genitive of an old(?) Estonian man’s name Viik(us), which could legitimately genitivize as Viige (see Luige and Kiige).
Vismeistri (Vismeister) 
From Fischmeister or ‘fishmaster’. Former village named after Toompea’s – what in today’s post-GoT world would be called – ‘Master of Fish’ in charge of fishing and fish supplies. Earliest record dating to 1515 as Vismestere. Name later adopted by a summer manor (see Mõisa) in Haabersti (for the locality’s history of name change, see Fišmeistri). In nearby Maardu there is a street called Teemeistri, inspector of roads, although some very dodgy pan-Gaian linguistico-bimbonerds claim this should be ‘tea-master’ (tee is both road and tea) due to a putative common parentage of Estonian and Japanese. One may legitimately suspect wishful thinking...
Trahteri (Trahter)
Lit. Tavern, inn, public house. Saagpakk suspects it comes from the Russian or German. EES suggests Esto-Swedish trafter, guesthouse which – given Sweden’s importing of French vocabulary following Napoleon’s installation of Bernadotte as son and heir to childless King Charles XIV John – probably comes from French traiteur, originally a person providing food for money, purveyor of food, thence restauranteur, now more or less a delicatessen and/or caterer, cf. Italian trattoria. Hence 3 main possibilities: 1) A farm or poolmõis (see Mõisa) just named Trahter (there was an Adami Trahteri tee / Aadamatrahteri koht [stead, seat] a few km east, possibly related); 2) A farm or poolmõis acting as inn. Since there were 2 streets/locations of the same name within 20 m of each other, this one, ‘new’ i.e. Uuetrahtri, also listed as ‘(Ges.)’ or Gesinde (dependency, see Õismäe); and ‘old’, Vanatrahtli, also listed as Kordon, or border post, presumably one set up between Tallinn and Harku under the first Soviet occupation of 1940-1941; and 3) a combination of both, probably the more likely solution.
Rocca al Mare (0) 
Name of summer estate (suvemõis, see Mõisa) of the Girard de Soucanton family (originally French Provençal; Arthur Baron Girard de Soucanton [1813-1884] was Tallinn councillor from 1864-1876 and Kunda burgomeister from 1876-1883). Apparently named after the erratic boulder in the sea nearby, and said to allude to the Venetian fort named Rocca al Mare, lit. “Rock by the sea” although known in English as the Koules Fortress, built around 1523-1540 in Heraklion (Ηρακλειον, city of Hercules) on the Greek island of Crete, hence its names in Greek, Κούλες (Koules); Italian: Castello a Mare; and Turkish: Kule Kalesi, Tower Castle). It is also said to relate to a poem written by Adelbert von Chamisso (Louis Charles Adelaide de Chamisso, 1781-1838), German poet and botanist of French aristocratic extraction, in his collection Salas y Gomez (title said to be painted on the side of the boulder) named after Sala y Gómez, a tiny (770 m wide) volcanic island 360 km ENE of Easter Island visited on Otto von Kotzebue’s 1815-1818 voyage to the South Sea and Bering’s Straits aboard the Russian ship Rurik. Its shape too, with a little imagination, could also resemble the square Venetian fortress. Rocca al Mare is Tallinn’s only Sub-district with just one street (the name of which should come as no surprise to anyone) and no inhabitants, being devoted entirely to the Eesti Vabaõhumuuseum, or Estonian Open Air Museum. What more can you say? Not much, except that a rock of that name does not seem to exist on any official Tallinn or Estonian map, list or database. If anyone sees it walk by, let me know. Thanks.







