Ior Bock and his colourful saga

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By Milka Sauvala
     
      The video picture is unsettling. Ior Bock is telling the story of his family as he is being driven to the excavations of the Lemminkäinen temple. Suddenly the car swerves off the road, and the picture cuts off.
      “It’s probably something to make us stay longer, to see what is happening there”, Bock says later to the journalist of A-Studio, a current affairs TV programme of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE).
      It is 1990 and Bock, whose beard is still brown, chats pleasantly. He is convinced that his ancestral land has a temple buried in it.
     
Well before that, Ior Bock (1942-2010), who was born under the name Bror Holger Svedlin, had been a colourful media personality. During his career he worked as a very popular tour guide at the island fortress of Suomenlinna. He was a frequent visitor to Goa, India, a mythologist, and all-round eccentric.
      There are not many idiosyncratic bearded figures like him left.
     
“He combined a mythological world picture with his own life. In that sense he was unique on a global scale”, says yoga teacher Juha Havanainen, a long-standing friend, who edited a book written by Bock.
      “On the private side he was gentle and edgy. He had a sharp consciousness and keen powers of observation, which has been left hidden from the public eye.”
     
In the 1980s he began to tell the saga of his family, which explained “the history of all humanity”, encompassing figures ranging from Lemminkäinen, one of the heroes of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, to Santa Claus.
      In the years that followed, the story developed further. According to Bock, his family property in Gumbostrand in the municipality of Sipoo, east of Helsinki, contained the “Temple of Lemminkäinen”, which he believed had been buried in the rock there for 1,000 years. Bock got followers from around the world, and soon blasting work began. At times there were dozens of apostles at the excavation site - as well as Lemminkäinen - the Finnish construction company by that name.
     
Things started going downhill when police began to investigate suspected drug dealing. His followers began to drift away, and he started getting less and less tour guide work.
      In 1999 Bock was at home when a man who had known Bock from Goa, and from parties in Helsinki, tried to get into his home.
      “I told him he could not come in, and went to have some tea. As I was doing it, the guy broke in. He stabbed me in the back four times”, Bock said later in an interview with Kuukausiliite, the monthly magazine supplement of Helsingin Sanomat.
     
Bock’s family property was auctioned off in 2000. The excavation was bought by yoga teacher Juha Javanainen, in the name of the Helsinki Astanga Yoga School.
      The excavation site has been quiet in recent years. “A few researchers have been there, and we have listened to their evaluations”, Javanainen says.
      “There are no concrete plans yet, but the intention is to continue. [The death] is a great loss, but the story is moving to a new phase.”
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 25.10.2010


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Ior Bock, tour guide, actor, colourful folklorist, stabbed to death on Saturday (25.10.2010)

Links:
  YouTube: Finnish digital artists honor the life´s work of Ior Bock

Helsingin Sanomat