Vabaduse väljak (Vabadus)

Freedom, liberty. Built over part of the former city walls and bastions (southern part of Pommeri Bastion and northern part of the 1686 Berghi Ravelin), today’s ‘Freedom Square’ has gone through many, many changes, the full dating of which I shall spare everybody, not least myself. The name sequence seems to have been: Новая пл., New Square (±1767, see Harju), followed (in approximate order) by Palgi turg (timber market), Heina turg (hay market) (Ger. Heumarkt, Rus. Сенной рынокъ [old spelling]) and/or Puu- ja Heinaturg (wood and hay market) (Ger. Holz- und Heumarkt) until around 1875; then Peetri plats (Peter’s square), after Peter I (Ger. Peterplatz or Peters-Platz, Rus. Петровская пл.) from 1910 till around 1922; with an interlude as Harju turg (Harju market, ±1921) and ending up with some 80-odd years of shilly-shallying between Vabaduse plats, Vabadusväljak (Ger. Freiheitsplatz. Note, väljak [square] is and sounds more Estonian than the German-sounding plats [square]), Võiduväljak (Victory Square by the Soviets in the 40s, twice), later revamped to Võidu väljak (note space) and back at last to Vabaduse väljak in 1989. The manufacture of street-signs is clearly a good business in Estonia.

Vabaduse puiestee (Vabadus)

Avenue in Nõmme renamed only once, briefly, to 21. Juuni from 1940-1941. Before being a road, however, records* (1926) list it as Vana kindluse raudtee, old defensive railway, after the remains of the confusingly-named Peter the Great’s Naval Fortress, aka Tallinn-Porkkala defense station, a line of fortification scheduled to include (on the Estonian side) hundreds of kilometers of railway with – in addition to the cannon mounted on flatbed wagons – guns on Naissaar, Aegna, Viimsi, Suurupi and Kakumäe designed to protect Saint Petersburg from attack by sea. See Peetri and Noblessneri. Part of the E67 from Helsinki to Prague.

* Possibly erroneous, the railway may have been 100 m or so further south...