The old manhole covers at the intersection of Kotzebue and Vana-Kalamaja streets, around the Kalamaja pharmacy, were preserved during the renovations of Vana-Kalamaja Street. Andres Siplane, a manhole cover enthusiast, contributed to their preservation.

Pärnu cover

This is a manhole cover from Pärnu machine factory.

Pärnu machine factory was actually located right where young Koidula had played with flowers and grass. That is, in Pärnu, in the square between three rivers (the Pärnu and Sauga rivers and the Rääma stream).

There, Koidula’s contemporary, Carl Sebulke (1845–1928), who had migrated to Pärnu from Germany, founded a metal industry in 1870. Carl Sebulke’s lamp posts can still be found in Pärnu near Munamäe and in Koidula park.

Carl Sebulke’s factory and production facilities of his apprentices Martin Seiler and Reinhold Stryck were destroyed in World War II but soon rebuilt. The factories initially operated separately: one was originally called Proletaar (the Proletarian) engine factory and the other the Pärnu mechanical dairy equipment factory. In 1958 the factories were merged and named Pärnu machine factory.

Pärnu machine factory produced all kinds of industrial and agricultural equipment and engines, including, of course, manhole covers. Covers from Pärnu machine factory are commonly found all over Estonia. The sauna ovens of Pärnu machine factory were also very popular.

As the factory followed direct orders from Moscow and a 10 per cent increase in production was expected every year, the factory worked insane overtime hours and even management had to get their hands dirty. However, the wage system was inflexible and people rapidly started leaving the factory. Product quality went down.

The factory was privatised at the end of the Soviet era, but failed to find a viable niche in these new circumstances. By now, the factory building on the Rääma 7 (Pärnu) plot has been demolished.

The standard cover of the Soviet Union or USSR

Until 1947, each factory cast its manhole covers exactly as it saw fit. So, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, cities developed unique designs. For example, distinct styles emerged in Tallinn, Tartu, Järvakandi and Narva. In Ukraine, there are distinctive designs for Mariupol, Kryvyi Rih, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and others.

As different communication networks (sewerage, telephone, electricity, gas, etc.) emerged and required clearer rules and more easily recognisable access to technical nodes, a unified standard for manhole covers was introduced in the Soviet Union in 1947: GOST-3634.

It is worth noting that this standard was met with inertia. Many factories continued producing covers that did not adhere to the GOST standard for another decade. However, this standard had been adopted everywhere by the 1960s.

Although covers started to look rather similar across the Soviet Union, that does not make them uninteresting. They are usually delicately marked by the manufacturer which makes cover observations much more exciting.

Unfortunately, there is no manufacturer’s mark on this cover. So let’s take this as a typical example of a standard USSR manhole cover.

The year 1977 on this cover denotes the year of production. The inscription GOST-3634 61 means that it is a manhole cover design that was modified in 1961. The letters GK stand for городская канализация or city sewerage. The letter T (in Russian: тяжелый) means that the cover can withstand heavy loads (up to 40 tonnes). In fact, sidewalk covers used to be marked L, which meant they could carry up to 5 tonnes. But somehow, a cover meant for drivers ended up here.

Siegel’s cover

Kurt Siegel was born in Leipzig in 1852 (and died in 1908 in Saint Petersburg). He came to the czardom and opened a company in Saint Petersburg as early as 1877. While he also produced manhole covers, he mainly built communication networks (rivalling Werner von Siemens, for example), gas appliances, heating systems and much more.

Already in 1882 Siegel founded a factory in Tallinn. He founded similar factories in Kyiv, Moscow, Odessa, Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipro) and Riga. Since his full name was Gottfried Kurt Siegel, he was called Kurt Bogdanovich in Saint Petersburg’s business circles.

In 1887 Siegel built the Tallinn telephone network and also became its operator. The central exchange was located in Pikk Street in the Old Town, in an apartment with “four rooms and a kitchen”. The network initially had 50 numbers. By constructing a telephone network, Siegel made the headlines, as everyone expected him to use Bell’s technology. Siegel, however, used Eriksson’s technology because “it supposedly suited the local climate better”.

People sometimes ask why his first name is denoted by a C on the cover. The German way would be to use K: Kurt. At the time, newspapers printed his name as starting with both C and K. However, an insignia in the tower on his Saint Petersburg house is CS: Curt with a C.

During the revolution, Siegel’s manufacturing empire also collapsed. His son Adam came to Tallinn with his mother to escape the revolution. Here, Adam revived the company and continued production. This is why the company name on the depicted cover is AS C. Siegel Tallinn. The name signalled that Siegel had businesses in locations beyond Tallinn.

In addition to castings, Adam Siegel also started importing cars such as BMW and Dodge. In the late thirties, Siegel was commissioned by Tallinn to bring Büssing-NAG buses to the country, which were used for public transport. During the time of the Vaps movement (from the Union of Participants in the Estonian War of Independence), Siegel was accused of brokering Hitler’s money to them. However, Kalle Muuli believes that this accusation was simply an attempt to discredit the members of the Movement. By the way, the same Artur Sirk in Kalle Muuli’s book, used to live right here on Kesk-Kalamaja Street.

In 1939, newspapers announce that director Adam Siegel had fallen ill with blood poisoning and that the world’s best surgeon was arriving from Königsberg to treat him. During the Second World War, Adam Siegel’s trace goes cold. We know that his mother Jenny or Jevgenia died in Dresden in 1940.

The depicted cover was produced in independent Estonia about a century ago. In Tallinn, on Kopli Street, one czarist-era Siegel cover has actually been preserved.

L.E.O. cover

The abbreviation L.E.O. on this manhole cover stands for Linnaehituse Osakond or the Urban Development Department. The letter T, however, signifies the city of Tallinn. Similar covers have been preserved around Tallinn, for example on the corner of Graniidi and Tööstuse Streets.

In the thirties, the city of Tallinn wanted to order manhole covers with its own markings. The procurement was won by Karl Graudin.

Karl Graudin (born 1881, date of death unknown) was born in Riga. His name was originally Karlis Graudinš. When he came to Estonia, he changed it to Graudin. In 1912, he bought an allegedly poorly managed factory from Johannes Kull, located at the intersection of Paldiski and Mustamäe Roads.

Perhaps Graudin also failed to manage his factory well, as worker strikes have been documented in 1922. Graudin paid the workers extra, and they agreed to continue working. In connection with the same incident, the then labour inspectorate visited the Graudin factory and found that workers had no facilities for dressing, eating and washing. The increased pay was probably so motivating that the workers did not mind.

Among other things, Graudin focused on enamelling technology. His newspaper advertisements called on Tallinn citizens to not buy imported tableware. Apparently, buying Graudin’s enamelled dippers and mugs would be much wiser, as they were supposedly unbreakable, even when dropped.

In 1933, the newspaper Sõnumid reports that gentlemen gathered in Mustamäe to shoot a clay pigeon from a pistol, and the most accurate shooter, with 23 out of 25 hits, was Mr. Graudin. This event was a revival of the medieval custom of shooting a colourful parrot figurine with a bow at today’s Kanuti tram stop.

In the 1930s, Graudin developed a model of enamelled metal cookers. Unlike stone-built stoves, it was portable and proved to be a very viable solution. When the communists seized power in June 1940, they nationalised all privately owned factories and renamed them with Soviet-style names. The workers at the Graudin factory had then supposedly submitted a humble petition to name their factory Pioneer. Their wish was granted. So now you know how the pioneer stove got its name.

Lietuvas cover

As you can see from the inscriptions, this manhole cover was cast in Lithuania in 1992.

The cover is special due to its Soviet-era design, but the inscriptions are in Lithuanian, and the date refers to a time after the Soviet Union’s collapse. This is a so-called transition cover.

Understandably, when a large state collapses, there is a huge amount of confusion. The independent Lithuanian state clearly had much more important laws to write in 1992 than to come up with standards for manhole covers.

So the Lithuanians, at least for the time being, continued to use the old design and simply translated all the inscriptions into Lithuanian. In Soviet times, the word lietuvas was replaced by лйт сср in Cyrillic, meaning the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Instead of the letter S, there was a T, meaning heavy. This in turn meant that the cover could support a maximum weight of 40 tonnes. The word “heavy” is sunkus in Lithuanian, тяжелый in Russian.

The letters TS stand for technical conditions or technines salygas in Lithuanian. During the Soviet era, this spot was marked by TY, meaning технические условия.

The letter K in the middle, of course, stands for sewerage. In both Russian (канализация) and Lithuanian (kanalizacija).

Similarly designed covers with Russian letters can still be found in Lithuania and Latvia. In addition to those transitional covers. Soon, however, the transition period ended and the Lithuanians developed their own cover designs, which they began to adorn with either their mounted princes or deer images.

Tallinn TMZ

This is a manhole cover of the Tallinn Machinebuilding Factory. The abbreviation TMZ stands for Таллинский машиностроительный завод (Tallinn Machinebuilding Factory). This factory was located just near here, at the intersection of Kopli and Volta. The Tallinn Machinebuilding Factory actually used to be a Franz Krull factory, founded as early as 1875.

Young and ambitious German Franz Joachim Heinrich Krull, or Franz Krull I (1836-1901), came from Holstein in Germany to seek his fortune in the Russian czardom. He first started manufacturing distillation apparatus in Narva in 1865. Krull’s equipment turned out to be of such high quality that it was disseminated throughout the czardom. He became enormously rich and arrived in Tallinn in 1875 with his fortune, where he established a large machine factory. The factory became one of the largest in Estonia.

Even though Krull lost control of his factory in 1917, he was well known and his good reputation ensured that the name AS Franz Krull was retained. In fact, the Krull name was so deeply rooted that when communists nationalised the factory in June 1940, they did not dare to change the name beyond modifying it to Punane Krull or Red Krull. Moreover, the red agitators only knew to call the factory employees “Krull’s workers” in their 1940 and 1941 rallies. In 1949, the reference to Krull was finally dropped and the factory renamed the Tallinn Machinebuilding Factory.

The grandson of the founder Franz Krull, also named Franz Krull, moved to Baden-Baden in 1939 as part of the German resettlement. However, it is noteworthy that in 1976, as an old man, Franz Krull III visited Tallinn and among other places the former Krull factory. This cover dates from around the same time.

You can still find designs manufactured in Franz Krull’s time from here and there. For example, there is still a tram post at the intersection of Põhja puiestee and Kotzebue, the bollards of the Katariina quay in Paljassaare are a Krull production from the czarist era, and the bell of Kunda church was also cast by Krull. But if you happen to see the Kreutzwald monument in Kadriorg, consider that this too was cast in the same factory, but during the era of the Tallinn Machinebuilding Factory.