The True Spirit of Scandinavia - An Elderhostel Trip

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Day 20 - June 20, 2009 - Saturday in Helsinki,
Today is the last regualrly scheduled day of our Elderhostel trip. Tomorrow everyone but us will be leaving but more on that later.
After breakfast we went on a bus tour of the city. Due to the midsummer holiday the streets were quite empty which made it much easier for the bus to get around. Helsini is the only European captial with no medieval past! In1746 Sweden built a huge fortress on an island outside of its harbor. The town of Helsinki was founded to supply the fortress. Actually, Helsinki was just a fishing village at that time. In 1809 Sweden having lost their war with Russia had to relinquish Finland to them.
In 1812, under Russian rule the capital and the university were relocated from Turku to Helsinki because it was much closer to St. Petersburg and thus more convenient. The town was modernized and turned into the capital of the Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. A young German architect, Carl Ludvig Engel, was hired to design new public buildings for Helsinki and he was told to use St. Petersburg as a model. Thus many of the stone buildings in the oldest part of Helsinki look Russian with thier blue and yellow pastels trimmed in white with the generous use of columns. Evidently, the films Gorky Park and Dr. Zhivago were filmed in Helsinki because the Cold War precluded filming in Russia.
The blue and white City Hall building with columns in front was designed by Engel in 1833 as the town's first hotel for the visit of the czar and czarina. The most beautiful building to me, said to be Carl Engel's masterpiece, is the white Lutheran Cathedral with its 3 green domes. The center done is large and is flanked by two smaller domes sprinkled with golden stars; they each have a gold cross on the top. The Uspenski Cathedral which is an Orthodox cathedral sits on a hill above Market Square and faces the Lutheran Cathedral. It has a large onion dome and many smaller ones. We also saw the Sibelius Monument which is disliked by many. Six hundred stainless steel pipes embedded into a rock shimmer in the sun in the middle of a park. Each one is engraved with a different design and matches no other. The artist who won a contest to design a monument to honor Finland's greatest composer was forced to add a bust of the composer's face a short distance away to silence the all the many people who were upset with the strange abstract monument.
We had a wonderful lunch at the famous Cafe Kappeli, an old fashioned gazebo-like oasis of flowers and light located on the lovely Esplande with its center garden and many statues. In the 19th century the cafe was a popular hangout for local intellectuals, artists and composers including Sibelius. Rick Steves says in his guidebook for Scandinavia, that it is his favorite restaurant in northern europe!
After lunch some of us walked to the ferry from our hotel to visit the island in the harbor with the historic sea fortress named Suomenlinnea. The fortress was built by Sweden over 250 years ago and has served as a strategic bastion for three countries: Sweden, Russia, and Finland. With five miles of walls and hundreds of cannons it was the second stongest fort in Europe after Gibralter. There is a visitor center, several military museums, and it is the home to Finland's Naval Academy. The island is large - actually, it's four islands connected by bridges- and there are many walkways along the top of the walls along the sea. Over 1000 people live in the many old buildings on the islands.
The most important part of the fortress is said to be the dry dock in which ships were built and stored during the Swedish period in the late 1700's. The dockyard fell into disrepair under the Russians until WWI when the Russians used it as a navy base. The Finns used it in after WWI and kept submarines there. We saw the one remaining submarine in Finland floating at a dock. It is the Vesikko built in Turku for the Germans in 1933. The Finns bought it in 1936 and it joined the Finnish sub fleet. In July 1941 it torpedoed the Russian Vyborg, a 3500 ton transport ship! In the Paris Treaty of 1947, Finland was forbidden to have submarines ever again. They can only have this one for the museum. It is the last of its type to survive. It was a prototype for the German type II U-Boat. After WWII the Finns had to build ships at the dockyard for the Russians as part of a war reparations deal. Helsinki was heavily bombed by the Russians during WWII but not as badly damaged as Germany.
In the evening our group met in the lobby to walk to another good restaurant "Raffles" for our farewell dinner! In the almost 3 weeks we've had four farewell dinners - one in every country. Tonight we had a delicous meal of seafood pasta and wine or beer. After dinner and a walk back to our hotel we gathered in the lobby for a short meeting to discuss our trip. Everyone's comments were positive and we agreed that we had indeed been immersed in the culture of the nordic countries and we have felt and experienced the true spirit of Scandinavia! It has been a festive evening but sad to know we are saying goodbye to almost everyone. We will see a few people in the morning at breakfast but many are leaving for the airport very early although our Elderhostel leader assures them there will be a continental breakfast for them before they leave. And he and our site coordinator Heikke Toimi will be there to bid them farewell even though it will be before 4:30 am!
Prior to closing the door on Finland, I want to correct a point of history I misunderstood and wrote about a few days ago. In 1917 Finland and the Baltic states won their independence from Russia by fighting a short vicious civil war with Russia. Within Finland two parties were at war with each other - the Reds (social democrats supported by Russia) and the Whites (non-socialistic conservatives assisted by the German Empire.)
After its independence Finland prospered until the secret Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 basically turned them over to the domination of Russia. Russia invaded Finland November, 1939 and Finland resisted. This is called the Winter War and they were able to hold off the Russians until signing a peace treaty in March 1940 where they were forced to turn over 9% of their land to Russia.
Finland is now part of the European Union joining in 1995. Their currency is the Euro. They proudly claim they were the first people to use the Euro since Finland is one hour ahead of the remainder of Europe. Finland has 8 political parties and a Parliament of 200 members in which 84 are women. Their president is a woman and she is serving her second 6 year term. She was reelected in 2007.
Tomorrow we are the only ones not flying away. We have decided to make a day trip to Tallin, Estonia.
So we bid you good night from Helsinki. Phyllis and Gene

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