Kassisaba (Kassisaba)

The name of the district is often accused of coming from a German military term Katze for an elevated bastion (none found), and the road leading from it as its tail (Ger. Schwanz, which also means ‘dick’). This is almost certainly wrong. A) No self-respecting army would name or nickname one of its defensive structures after a vagina, trollop, flighty woman or prostitute, no matter how cute and cuddly its primary definition; and B) Estonia has had at least half a dozen farms or bits of village called Kassisaba anyway, hardly fighting stuff. It is almost certainly a legacy confusion with the German Schanze, ‘sconce’ in English, which is indeed an elevated fortification (e.g. redoubt), often protected by a couvreface, but a term so rarely used that even Uncle Toby of Tristam Shandy fame failed to mention it once… As to the ‘tail’, the point of a bastion is to avoid having a road either to it or from it, so my suggestion is a bilingual mistranslation, with Schanze sounding like Schwanz, and Katze a possibly humorous re-reading of Est. Kaitse, ‘defense’, so just a plain old defensive bastion.