Veerenni

Veerenni (red) district in Tallinn's Kesklinn (yellow) district

Veerenni (in German about " eaves " or " aqueduct ") is a district ( Estonian asum ) of the Estonian capital Tallinn . It is located in the Kesklinn district ("inner city").

Description and history

Veerenni has 1,068 inhabitants (as of May 1, 2010).

The name of the district comes from the artificial waterway that during the Middle Ages by Ülemiste Lake in the Old Town led by Tallinn. The four-kilometer-long masonry canal was built in 1345.

The area remained largely undeveloped for a long time. It was not until the railway line between the Baltic Sea port of Paldiski and Tallinn that industrial companies and workers began to settle.

Luther furniture factory

The Luther furniture factory, one of the largest industrial companies in Estonia at the time , played a major role in Veerennis’s development . In 1877, Alexander Martin Luther and Markel Makarov , who came from an entrepreneurial dynasty, founded a sawmill. Six years later a boiler house was built and in 1891 the company's single-storey industrial building. From 1885 the company was the first company in the Russian Empire to produce plywood .

Between 1897 and the First World War , the company, which also had a branch in England, continued to grow. In 1914 the furniture and wood factory employed 2,000 workers. In the interwar period it was one of the largest Estonian export companies to Central Europe. With the Soviet occupation of Estonia, the company was nationalized in 1940.

In 1904/05 the representative Volkshaus with canteen was built for the workers in the national romantic style according to plans by the Finnish architects Herman Gesellius , Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen .

Other important buildings

In 1928 the entrepreneur Haim Karschenstein founded the gentleman raincoat factory in Veerenni . It was expropriated by the Soviet occupation authorities in 1940. The textile company Baltika later developed from it . It was one of the first companies to be privatized by the Estonian state in 1991.

In 1929 the church of the Estonian Methodist congregation was built in Veerenni , at that time one of the largest church buildings in continental Europe. It was destroyed in the devastating attack by the Soviet Air Force on Tallinn in March 1944.