OUR GUIDES

FINLAND IS A BORDERLAND BETWEEN WESTERN AND EASTERN EUROPE, AND THIS FACT HAS BECOME THE ARCHITECTURAL LANGUAGE OF HELSINKI.

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I use the term fortress rather than castle to indicate that the purpose of Suomenlinna was almost wholly military, whereas in most other countries castles filled, in addition, the social role of residence of the nobility.

 

Finland is strewn with fortifications of a kind, having been so continually as a battleground. The wars between the Swedes, Russians, the German Empire, the Greater German Reich, and Soviets, which were fought backwards and forwards across the Finnish countryside from the late sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, left behind great numbers of walls, trenches and embankments, and lengths of stone revetment either standing on islands or buried in the woods.

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Richards, J.M. A Guide to Finnish Architecture, Hugh Evelyn, London, 1968 (page 31).    

 

FOLLOWING YEARS OF DEVASTATING WARS, FINLAND, REVIVED BY THE REALISATION IT HAD SAFEGUARDED ITS INDEPENDENCE, THOUGH AT A VERY HIGH PRICE IN LIVES, WAS DETERMINED TO RECOVER AND REBUILD.

 

IN HELSINKI THERE WAS AN UNPRECEDENTED SENSE OF THIS PURPOSE, TO RELY ON THEIR OWN RESOURCES, INVENTION AND CREATIVITY, TO RELY ON NO ONE ELSE.​​​​

 

​​​Swedes we are not,

Russians we do not want to be,

So let us be Finns.

--Adolf Ivar Arwidsson (August 1791 to June 1858)