(Finland)—Slightly jetlagged, in that nice manner of letting everything sweep over you and offering very little in a struggle against it, I was sitting on a lawn at a manor house called Haikko (www.haikko.fi), some 40 kilometres outside of Helsinki. It dates back to 1362, when it was home to Dominican priests who were part of the Russian monastery of Vyborg, but equally interesting was that the home’s latest renovation was funded by a lottery win, even though the latest owners would never be classed amongst the poor. Just down the road is the country’s second-oldest town, Porvoo, whose Finnish name comes from the local phonetic attempt to say its Swedish name of Borjå. Most of the Finnish places I visited have populations of Swedish speakers. Finnish, itself, is a far more difficult language to learn.
Porvoo has a wonderful district of cobbled lanes and red, wooden houses that today receives growing numbers of visitors but a part of which, up the hill, in the 1960s and 70s was often referred to as the “Shanghai of the Nordic Countries,” for its inherent dangers to life and limb from its inhabitants, apparently. It is noted for its snail restaurants. Timbaali (www.timbaali.com) even has a rout of snails crossing its awning.
Helsinki must be notable in that it is the only place I can ever remember going to in which I wanted to go shopping. I detest shopping, but in the village of Fiskars, famous for its orange-handled scissors, I visited its design museum and saw several shirts made by equally well-known Finnish company, Marimekko (www.marimekko.fi). In case anyone thinks I am softening, going to visit the shop was a last-minute decision I took after realizing I had 20 minutes following a visit to the Suomenlinna island-fortress (www.suomenlinna.fi) and not a stop I had to make before discovering that island’s hummocks, beaches, ponds, battlements and, even, a beached submarine. This UNESCO World Heritage site (no, not Marimekko) has, I was surprised to learn, a resident population of almost 900, as made evident by the existence of a supermarket just before the local ferry pier. Also, somewhere else on the island and not seen by my curious eyes is a työsiirtola, an open prison for very low-risk prisoners.
The most-visited spot, but also the area where you can most easily escape all other people, the fortifications of the King’s Gate, reveals an inscription that reads “Eftervärld, stå här på egen botn och lita icke på främmande hjälp,” which is Swedish, not Finnish, and means “Progeny, stand here on your own foundation and do not rely on foreign help.”
This was a quote from Count Augustin Ehrensvärd, who was commissioned to build the fort when Finland was part of Sweden. The city of Turku, the oldest settlement in Finland, also unveiled some interesting history. This small city will share the honours with Tallinn, Estonia, of being one of the two Cultural Capitals of Europe in 2011, and while it is pleasant, I think it will find it hard to compete against the medieval atmosphere of the Estonian capital, but let’s hope they work together.
One of my favourite Turku finds was a bust of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. It was tucked away beside a red-brick building and was not on any official tourism pamphlet that I read, but it turns out that he stayed in a house here (of which it is now outside of) when in 1907 he fled Russia. In those years, Finland was part of Russia. He must have been grateful, as one of the first acts he administered when the Soviet Union was formed in 1917 was to give Finland full independence. On the other side of the equation, I took a boat from Turku to the island of Ruissalo, which yearly hosts the Ruisrock rock festival (www.ruisrock.fi). It’s been a while since I had been to one (Reading in the early 1990s, Glastonbury a little before that).
The Sunday line-up of bands was notable for being the last show by local heroes, The Crash (www.thecrash.com), whose songs are catchy but a little poppy for my tastes. They did a version of The Smiths’ There is a Light that Never Goes Out, which was excellent. I also managed to see The Gaslight Anthem (www.gaslightanthem.com), who hail from New Brunswick, N.J., which is the main campus of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (www.rutgers.edu), where I studied for my Master’s degree, and the Soul Captain Band, Finland’s most famous, and probably only, reggae band.
Also in Turku was a musical tree, an oak to which was tied a dozen mobile phones. A list of birds and their relevant mobile-phone numbers were listed below, and if you call one, you hear the sound the bird makes trill through the air. I rather liked it, the idea that using your personal phone can lead to a moment not of noise and meaningless chatter but one of quiet and contemplation.
Back in Helsinki I pottered around various neighborhoods, promontories and islands. One spit of land, Katajanokka Skatudden, very close to the central harbour (see photo above), I liked tremendously, and the next time I go, I will have to visit and eat at a restaurant tucked at the base of a circular building away from the stares of tourists. It was called Welloma (www.wellamo.fi), and if you climb up the steps beside it and then turn on the streets above it, you can get an excellent view of the Russian Orthodox Church of Uspenski.

(Åland Islands, Finland)...One of the most curious, fascinating and wonderful places I have been to is the Åland Islands, off the coast of Sweden. It actually is a part of Finland, although the culture is Swedish. No doubt, the people there consider themselves apart from that country, too; it has the distinction of its autonomy being settled in June, 1921, by the ill-fated League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations.
The islands – and there are up to 400 of them, with perhaps even 6,000 more isolated rocks and islets jutting upwards, scattered over a land bridge extending across a parcel of water that effectively is the barrier between the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia – even publish their own postage stamps. I came here after running a marathon in Stockholm, and it is a fantastic place to recuperate. The ferry leaves the Swedish port of Grisslehamn en route to Eckerö on the Eckerö Linjen (www.eckerolinjen.fi) ferry line, on which people can witness the Swedish fascination with slot machines. At the time of my crossing, these machines were illegal in Sweden, and the ferry-crossers seemed more than willing to catch up with lost time.
The island of Eckerö (www.eckero.aland.fi) is the closest Åland Islands island to Sweden and also one of its largest. Immediately, all the cars embarked off the ferry and disappeared in the direction of the islands’ capital, Mariehamn, which is on neighbouring island, one that seems apparently nameless, although I did see the word Jomala written here and there. I walked. There was a small office that booked accommodation for travellers, then a narrow path that wound threw a wood and past a nature park that contained deer and ended up at a museum chronicling Åland life, hunting and fishing, in a tiny village called Vallberget. Minute cottages – stugas – dotted a park, and I stayed in one, right on a stretch of water at Käringsund. It was June, high summer, and things were idyllic. During the long, long evenings, as I walked along the traffic-less road to a dot of an isle called Främstö, I saw otters playing in the calm water and families singing songs accompanied by guitars.
Children seemingly are encouraged to stay up most of the night, perhaps making up for time that will be lost during the long, less-fulfilling winters. Just before dusk, a hare would appear at the edge of a field by my stuga, settle down for the night and remain there until the morning. There was a short walk back to the ferry terminal, then a lesser one to an old building that doubled as a museum and a post office, from where left the bus to Mariehamn. Approximately 30 kilometres away, it has a population of 25,000, and also some introduced peacocks on a small islet called Lilla Holmen. In its museum are displays pointing to its importance to the Vikings, and its status as a trading route can be seen in artifacts hailing from such Middle Eastern sites as Baghdad and Samarkand.
On the way home, I stopped off to see the church at Kyrkoby, which means Village of the Church in Swedish. It has a fine steeple, not particularly high, but wide and brown, and the lane beside it continues to end at a point that is nowhere in particular but none the less worthy for it—a lane; fields; hedges, and a small bay with one boat. The islands still enjoy a good degree of autonomy. No army bases are allowed on the island, and its parliament, the Lagting, elects two members to the Nordic Council and the European Union.
The walk back from the church was sunny, uneventful and perfect. The photograph above shows the top, spinning section of a maypole, with four sailing boats nodding towards the importance of the islands’ maritime history. Also extremely prevalent on the islands were 1950’s-era cars from the United States. I saw at least 10 classic automobiles. The ownership of these is very popular in Sweden, and it seems that to bring them to the Åland Islands is the quite the thing to do in the summer. I did not hear Rockabilly music, however. The politics of the island seem likewise placid, with a “revolutionary” mix of liberals, moderates, Social Democrats and independents, although what they feel they have to be independent of is beyond me.
Perhaps the moderates are not moderate enough? They all sit in an elected chamber called the Landskapsstyrelse, which like all Scandinavian words admirably dispenses with the need for apostrophes. One current law requires property owners to be citizens of the islands, not merely members of the European Union. From a shop selling only nautical tools and equipment I bought a high-quality Åland Islands flag, which has the classic Scandinavian design of a cross, with the vertical lines off center to the left. Whereas the Swedish flag is a yellow cross on a blue background, the Åland Islands’ flag has a red cross within a yellow cross on a background of the same colour. It hangs in my office.