Paljassaare (Paljassaar)

Bare, bleak island. Paljassaar is as much peninsula, District, road, harbor, bird reserve as host to Tallinn’s primary sewage plant with 20 settling tanks and 200,000 m² of sludge-drying beds. It was also, 10,000 years ago, not even there. Neither was Tallinn. Kopli began appearing about 4-5000 years ago, and Paljassaar only came into existence some 100 years ago, emerging first from two islands, Suur-Karli and Väike-Karli, or der große Karl and der kleine Karl (big & little Charles). About 2000 years ago, Kopli was half peninsula and half island, and Paljasaar was represented by maybe half an inch of Suur-Karli. One thousand years later, Kopli had grown into a fully-formed peninsula and Väike-Karli was a few hundred meters long, which sort of explains the name. By the time Francisco Ludwig Franck v. Franckenberg drew his map of 1726, they had sandbanks stretching nearly all the way to Kopli, and by the time the Russian military mapped Tallinn in 1900 the peninsula had formed. Lastly, since tectonic activity continues (see Liiva) and the peninsula is surging upwards at the exhausting rate of approx. 2.4 mm per year (but perhaps confounded by the corresponding rise in sea level of about 1.8 mm / year over the past 500 years) we may even see a mountain one day (according to Estonian conditions [see Mãe], in about 83,000 years)... Don’t wait, Switzerland offers better skiing.