Kalarand

This guide to Kalarand in Tallinn returns to the Noblessner shipyard that once stood on this shore, founded in 1912 by Emanuel Nobel and Arthur Lessner to solve a problem the Russian navy's main base near St Petersburg couldn't: shallow water unfit for testing submarines. Between 1913 and 1917, crews built and sea-trialed a dozen vessels here, four of them named for predators, drawing power supplied by the neighboring Volta Factory, itself named for the physicist who invented the battery. The shipyard lasted barely five years before war, revolution and a 1925 bankruptcy shut it down, decades before this stretch of shore ever became a public beach.