Tuesday, July 6
Helsinki
On Tuesday, July 6th, we docked in Helsinki. Helsinki is the capital of Finland. Founded in 1550, the "Daughter of the Baltic" has been the Finnish capital since 1812, when it was rebuilt by the czars of Russia along the lines of a miniature St. Petersburg, a role it has played in many a Cold War movie. Today, Helsinki pulls off the trick of being something of an international metropolis while still retaining a small-town feel. A beautiful archipelago surrounds the Helsinki city center. There are 380 islands around Helsinki.
Helsinki's current population is about 575,000, but the Greater Helsinki region including the neighboring suburban cities of Espoo and Vantaa has a population of over 1.3 million.
Helsinki was founded in A.D. 1550 by King Gustav Vasa of Sweden as a trading post to compete with Tallinn to the south in Estonia, which was Danish at that time. The growth of the city was slow until the establishment of Sveaborg (nowadays Suomenlinna) Maritime Fortress in the front of Helsinki in the middle of 18th century. In 1809, Finland was annexed by Russia during a war of that period and the capital of Finland moved from Turku to Helsinki in 1812. The Czar felt the Grand Duchy of Finland needed a capital of grand proportions. The architects Johan Albrecht Ehrenström, a native Finn, and Carl Ludwig Engel, from Germany, were given the task of rebuilding the city in the Empire style. This can be seen today around the Lutheran Cathedral, which was completed in 1852. The same style, and even architects, are also a part of Saint Petersburg's history.
We had an afternoon tour, so we spent the morning poolside after a light breakfast in the Garden Cafe. It was our first cloudy since Copenhagen, but at least it was warm and we did not have any rain. In the afternoon, we had a quick lunch again in the Garden Cafe and proceeded to the meeting point for the tour - the Stardust Lounge. The tour was called "Discover Helsinki" and hit all the highlights of the city. The tour guide was very informative. Here are some of the facts she shared:
• Finland has 5.2 million people. 20 percent live in Helsinki.
• There are two official languages: Finnish and Swedish.
• There are two official religions: Lutheran and Orthodox.
• Finland has the largest shipbuilding industry in the world. Finland built the last two giant ships for Royal Caribbean (the “Oasis of the Seas” is now the largest in the world). Helsinki has eight ice breakers - these are huge cruise like ships that break through the ice in the wintertime. We passed by five of them.
• Traffic lights came to Helsinki in 1952 for the Olympics.
• There are two official theaters - the National Theater for Finnish performances and the Swedish Theater for Swedish performances.
• Finland was the first European country to allow women to vote in 1906. Most people in government are women - the president is a woman.
The first stop was the Church in the Rock - built in 1969. From above, it resembles a crashed UFO.
It is dug out from a huge solid piece of granite, so it has the feeling of being in a large stone cave. 22 km of copper strips formed into circles compose the dome of the church. There are services in Finnish, Swedish, and English. It is the most popular place in Helsinki for weddings and baptisms. There are seats for 1000 people. When we visited, someone from the local university was playing the organ. The acoustics were amazing.
The next stop was the Sibelius Monument. The world-famous composer Jean Sibelius' monument was designed by sculptress Eila Hiltunen and unveiled in 1967. It is one of the most well-known tourist attractions in Helsinki as nearly every guided tourist tour is brought to Sibelius Park to marvel at this unique work of art resembling organ pipes, welded together from 600 pipes and weighing over 24 metric tons. No one is quite sure what it actually represents.
As we traveled to the next location, the tour guide provided some additional facts:
• Most children attend public school. The parents must pick the schooling language - Swedish or Finnish. Every child receives warm meal free of charge at lunch. Finnish children have the possibility to study four foreign languages while in school, starting with the first grade.
• The winter is very long – about 6 months. With so long without sun, adults and children are encouraged to take vitamin D.
• Mothers get 9 months of paid maternity leave at 60 percent of salary. Mothers receive a child allowance of about 100 Euros per month per child until they turn 17. All residents are guaranteed a minimum standard of living - there is no poverty. There are no beggars. There is practically no cost for health care – it is all included in the taxes.
• The average salary is about 2,500 Euros per month. Tax ranges from 25 to 60 percent. There is a tax for eating out (restaurant tax) which is 22 percent.
• All houses have saunas. Saunas are generally used over the course of a couple of hours and can be somewhat of a social activity. You go in for about 20 min and then jump in the water to cool off. Then drink a beer and do it all over again. If not built near water, then people jump into the snow to cool off.
• Most people know the company Nokia. Nokia is actually the name of a village in Finland that grew into a town. The company actually started manufacturing rubber products and then at some point switched to mobile phones.
• We noticed some areas near the water that looked like picnic tables. It was explained that these tables are for cleaning your rugs. There are actually 14 places like this around Helsinki where you can clean your rugs.
• Fins are number 1 in Europe in the consumption of ice cream, milk, and coffee.
We passed by a number of noteworthy sites on our way to the next stop:
Olympic Stadium and Olympic Tower - Helsinki is an Olympic city, the host of the 1952 Olympic Games. Olympic Stadium, was originally built for the Olympics and renovated for the 2005 World Athletic Championships. The most popular building in the complex, though, is the Uimastadion, Helsinki's largest outdoor pool. After the war, the pool was used to store herring and potatoes! The stadium features 72m high tower that offers a great view over the city.
Parliament House - The House of the 200-seat Parliament of Finland was designed by J.S. Sirén in the classic style of the 1920s and officially inaugurated in 1931. The interior is classical with a touch of functionalism and art deco.
Uspenski Cathedral - is a classical onion-domed Russian church prominently located near the Market Square, Uspenski Cathedral serves Finland's small Orthodox minority and is the largest Orthodox church in Western Europe. The name comes from the Russian uspenie, from the Dormition (death) of the Virgin Mary. The five domes are topped with 22-carat gold, and some of the icons within are held to be miraculous.
Suommenlina island fortress - Suomenlinna is known as the "Gibraltar of the North" and was once the greatest sea fortress in the Baltic, built by the Swedish in the mid-1700s at great expense to protect their eastern flank. But when the Russians invaded in February 1808, the bulk of the unprepared and bankrupt Swedish army hastily withdrew, allowing the Russians to conquer Helsinki without a fight and besiege the fortress. With no reinforcements in sight, Commander Carl Olof Cronstedt surrendered unconditionally two months later, and Finland was ceded to the Russians. Cronstedt's actions probably saved countless civilian lives, but King Gustav IV needed a scapegoat and sentenced him to death for treason; fortunately, the losing king was himself soon overthrown, and Cronstedt lived out his years gardening.
Today's Suomenlinna is still living in its own time with only old buildings, few cars, fewer than a thousand inhabitants and lots of old fortifications, catacombs and cast iron cannons. But it's not just a museum: the sprawling complex houses restaurants, cafes, theaters and museums, and is a very popular place for a picnic on a fine summer day, watching the vast passenger ferries drift by on their way to Estonia and St Petersburg. It was included in UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1991 as a unique monument to European military architecture.
The last stop was for Senate Square and the Lutheran Cathedral. The statue of liberal Russian czar Alexander II stands guard in front of the church. There are four statues surrounding him representing law, light, labor, and peace. Lutheran Cathedral is the unofficial symbol of the city. This striking white cathedral dominates the central Senate Square. Based on designs by Carl Ludvig Engel and completed in 1852, the cathedral has recently been refurbished and looks better than ever, with the 12 apostles on the roof once again looking down at the world below. These 12 statues on the building are made of Zinc – this is the largest collection in the world.
The tour guide gave us a little bit of history on the way back summarized below:
12th century - Christian crusaders
1515 - Gustav Vasa founded Helsinki.
1808 - war between Sweden and Russia. Sweden lost Finland to Russia.
1812 - only 4,000 residents and 11 stone houses. Alexander I invited architects from Russia to build the city.
1917 - Finland becomes independent.
Helsinki
On Tuesday, July 6th, we docked in Helsinki. Helsinki is the capital of Finland. Founded in 1550, the "Daughter of the Baltic" has been the Finnish capital since 1812, when it was rebuilt by the czars of Russia along the lines of a miniature St. Petersburg, a role it has played in many a Cold War movie. Today, Helsinki pulls off the trick of being something of an international metropolis while still retaining a small-town feel. A beautiful archipelago surrounds the Helsinki city center. There are 380 islands around Helsinki.
Helsinki's current population is about 575,000, but the Greater Helsinki region including the neighboring suburban cities of Espoo and Vantaa has a population of over 1.3 million.
Helsinki was founded in A.D. 1550 by King Gustav Vasa of Sweden as a trading post to compete with Tallinn to the south in Estonia, which was Danish at that time. The growth of the city was slow until the establishment of Sveaborg (nowadays Suomenlinna) Maritime Fortress in the front of Helsinki in the middle of 18th century. In 1809, Finland was annexed by Russia during a war of that period and the capital of Finland moved from Turku to Helsinki in 1812. The Czar felt the Grand Duchy of Finland needed a capital of grand proportions. The architects Johan Albrecht Ehrenström, a native Finn, and Carl Ludwig Engel, from Germany, were given the task of rebuilding the city in the Empire style. This can be seen today around the Lutheran Cathedral, which was completed in 1852. The same style, and even architects, are also a part of Saint Petersburg's history.
We had an afternoon tour, so we spent the morning poolside after a light breakfast in the Garden Cafe. It was our first cloudy since Copenhagen, but at least it was warm and we did not have any rain. In the afternoon, we had a quick lunch again in the Garden Cafe and proceeded to the meeting point for the tour - the Stardust Lounge. The tour was called "Discover Helsinki" and hit all the highlights of the city. The tour guide was very informative. Here are some of the facts she shared:
• Finland has 5.2 million people. 20 percent live in Helsinki.
• There are two official languages: Finnish and Swedish.
• There are two official religions: Lutheran and Orthodox.
• Finland has the largest shipbuilding industry in the world. Finland built the last two giant ships for Royal Caribbean (the “Oasis of the Seas” is now the largest in the world). Helsinki has eight ice breakers - these are huge cruise like ships that break through the ice in the wintertime. We passed by five of them.
• Traffic lights came to Helsinki in 1952 for the Olympics.
• There are two official theaters - the National Theater for Finnish performances and the Swedish Theater for Swedish performances.
• Finland was the first European country to allow women to vote in 1906. Most people in government are women - the president is a woman.
The first stop was the Church in the Rock - built in 1969. From above, it resembles a crashed UFO.
It is dug out from a huge solid piece of granite, so it has the feeling of being in a large stone cave. 22 km of copper strips formed into circles compose the dome of the church. There are services in Finnish, Swedish, and English. It is the most popular place in Helsinki for weddings and baptisms. There are seats for 1000 people. When we visited, someone from the local university was playing the organ. The acoustics were amazing.
The next stop was the Sibelius Monument. The world-famous composer Jean Sibelius' monument was designed by sculptress Eila Hiltunen and unveiled in 1967. It is one of the most well-known tourist attractions in Helsinki as nearly every guided tourist tour is brought to Sibelius Park to marvel at this unique work of art resembling organ pipes, welded together from 600 pipes and weighing over 24 metric tons. No one is quite sure what it actually represents.
As we traveled to the next location, the tour guide provided some additional facts:
• Most children attend public school. The parents must pick the schooling language - Swedish or Finnish. Every child receives warm meal free of charge at lunch. Finnish children have the possibility to study four foreign languages while in school, starting with the first grade.
• The winter is very long – about 6 months. With so long without sun, adults and children are encouraged to take vitamin D.
• Mothers get 9 months of paid maternity leave at 60 percent of salary. Mothers receive a child allowance of about 100 Euros per month per child until they turn 17. All residents are guaranteed a minimum standard of living - there is no poverty. There are no beggars. There is practically no cost for health care – it is all included in the taxes.
• The average salary is about 2,500 Euros per month. Tax ranges from 25 to 60 percent. There is a tax for eating out (restaurant tax) which is 22 percent.
• All houses have saunas. Saunas are generally used over the course of a couple of hours and can be somewhat of a social activity. You go in for about 20 min and then jump in the water to cool off. Then drink a beer and do it all over again. If not built near water, then people jump into the snow to cool off.
• Most people know the company Nokia. Nokia is actually the name of a village in Finland that grew into a town. The company actually started manufacturing rubber products and then at some point switched to mobile phones.
• We noticed some areas near the water that looked like picnic tables. It was explained that these tables are for cleaning your rugs. There are actually 14 places like this around Helsinki where you can clean your rugs.
• Fins are number 1 in Europe in the consumption of ice cream, milk, and coffee.
We passed by a number of noteworthy sites on our way to the next stop:
Olympic Stadium and Olympic Tower - Helsinki is an Olympic city, the host of the 1952 Olympic Games. Olympic Stadium, was originally built for the Olympics and renovated for the 2005 World Athletic Championships. The most popular building in the complex, though, is the Uimastadion, Helsinki's largest outdoor pool. After the war, the pool was used to store herring and potatoes! The stadium features 72m high tower that offers a great view over the city.
Parliament House - The House of the 200-seat Parliament of Finland was designed by J.S. Sirén in the classic style of the 1920s and officially inaugurated in 1931. The interior is classical with a touch of functionalism and art deco.
Uspenski Cathedral - is a classical onion-domed Russian church prominently located near the Market Square, Uspenski Cathedral serves Finland's small Orthodox minority and is the largest Orthodox church in Western Europe. The name comes from the Russian uspenie, from the Dormition (death) of the Virgin Mary. The five domes are topped with 22-carat gold, and some of the icons within are held to be miraculous.
Suommenlina island fortress - Suomenlinna is known as the "Gibraltar of the North" and was once the greatest sea fortress in the Baltic, built by the Swedish in the mid-1700s at great expense to protect their eastern flank. But when the Russians invaded in February 1808, the bulk of the unprepared and bankrupt Swedish army hastily withdrew, allowing the Russians to conquer Helsinki without a fight and besiege the fortress. With no reinforcements in sight, Commander Carl Olof Cronstedt surrendered unconditionally two months later, and Finland was ceded to the Russians. Cronstedt's actions probably saved countless civilian lives, but King Gustav IV needed a scapegoat and sentenced him to death for treason; fortunately, the losing king was himself soon overthrown, and Cronstedt lived out his years gardening.
Today's Suomenlinna is still living in its own time with only old buildings, few cars, fewer than a thousand inhabitants and lots of old fortifications, catacombs and cast iron cannons. But it's not just a museum: the sprawling complex houses restaurants, cafes, theaters and museums, and is a very popular place for a picnic on a fine summer day, watching the vast passenger ferries drift by on their way to Estonia and St Petersburg. It was included in UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1991 as a unique monument to European military architecture.
The last stop was for Senate Square and the Lutheran Cathedral. The statue of liberal Russian czar Alexander II stands guard in front of the church. There are four statues surrounding him representing law, light, labor, and peace. Lutheran Cathedral is the unofficial symbol of the city. This striking white cathedral dominates the central Senate Square. Based on designs by Carl Ludvig Engel and completed in 1852, the cathedral has recently been refurbished and looks better than ever, with the 12 apostles on the roof once again looking down at the world below. These 12 statues on the building are made of Zinc – this is the largest collection in the world.
The tour guide gave us a little bit of history on the way back summarized below:
12th century - Christian crusaders
1515 - Gustav Vasa founded Helsinki.
1808 - war between Sweden and Russia. Sweden lost Finland to Russia.
1812 - only 4,000 residents and 11 stone houses. Alexander I invited architects from Russia to build the city.
1917 - Finland becomes independent.
