WHAT DOES FINLAND REALLY LOOK LIKE?
An alternative look behind the visual myths
By Ilkka Malmberg, with photographs by Markus Jokela
To mark Independence Day, go to the window and take a look outside. What do you see out there? A lake shimmering between lofty stands of pines? Somehow I don’t think so. Our native land does not really look anything like the image we project for ourselves.
How do we recognise Finland? If some scenes of a foreign film are shot in Finland, for example those wintry shots in Doctor Zhivago, the forests and the sky immediately look strangely familiar. The steam locomotive races through the snowy-white landscape, the conifers flash past, the grey sky shows behind the trees - not a shred of doubt about it: Finland. It’s Finland we are looking at.
If we come across a photo, we can usually tell if it is of Finland. We see right away from the landscape, from the highway, from the image of the city, that the picture has been taken here and not in England; there is even a difference about the way Sweden looks, let alone our other neighbour, Russia.
We also have no difficulty recognising a Finnish home when we see one: the kitchen, the living-room, even the WC. A lot of white surfaces, easy to keep clean; fittings and handles that look right, locks that we recognise, light switches we’ve seen a thousand times before, the same white Isku cupboards and closets.
And in the bathroom and the loo, those familiar Oras taps and shower fittings, that WC fixture that looks like the Moominpapa character - even the toilet-roll holder and the paper is familiar.
And isn’t it strange how a Finnish face nearly always stands out in a crowd of foreigners. Where’s the difference? Maybe in the eyes, something in the look, perhaps.
Landscapes, too, have an expression, and a look about them. Can you catch it with a camera?
"Finland is clean, brightly-lit, and warm; the paintwork’s good, the buildings don’t lean and lurch"
We’ll start in Kouvola. It’s a Finnish town, pretty much like any other, with a population of around 32,000. It sits at 60° 88'N, 26° 70'E.
The location is only significant in the sense that if one were to draw a line horizontally across the map at this point, half of the Finnish population would lie to the north, and half to the south.
Kouvola is a good starting point: the great majority of the Finnish population lives in a built-up area like this today.
Finland is one big Kouvola.
This is what Finland looks like in the early years of the 21st century. Walking along a pedestrian precinct in the centre of Kouvola, you could be in any Finnish city whatsoever, on any pedestrian precinct whatsoever: a lot of glass, a lot of steel, logos just above head height, brick-tiled walls and paving-stones.
And in the middle of all this sit some old people, talking about their ailments. They were born into a very different Finland, one that you can no longer see hide nor hair of.
But at least it’s clean and tidy.
And inside, in the shopping mall, it’s warm. Don’t believe them; Finland ISN’T a cold country, it’s not cold and it’s not dark.
Finland is clean, and brightly-lit, and warm: the streets and the public spaces are well illuminated. Offices, foyer areas, trains, bus stations, stairwells, all heated.
The recommended ambient temperature for apartments these days is as much as 21 or 22°C.
Those people who experienced the Finland of the war years and the hard grind of post-war reconstruction can now go and warm themselves in the shopping mall, where the air is gently scented from the Doner kebab kiosk.
There is also another kind of Finnish built-up landscape, one that can be found not so very far from Kouvola: the village centre of Pyhtää.
This, too, looks like the everyday landscape of many Finns in the early years of the new millennium.
The windows of commercial premises are covered from the inside with thick brown paper, only the hairdresser’s salon is struggling on in business.
What passes for a downtown area is dominated by Super Mahmud, a flea market under Russian ownership, which gathers in its yard teetering piles of winter tyres and old refrigerators.
Rolators slide by, propelled by shuffling elderly folk.
Next to the medieval stone church is the garish red and yellow blare of a Sale discount supermarket, its livery rendering it like Beelzebub’s Lair nestled next to the place of worship.
Lahti is a bit bigger than Kouvola. There is no shortage of places to go in Lahti, to be sure, but since it is a Friday evening, we’ll go where everyone else is headed - to market.
This means a hypermarket, or a megamarket.
There is a KKKK* Citymarket, a Eurospar, and a Prisma, all snuggled up side-by-side.
Take your pick.
We are getting down to the nitty-gritty, the real archetypal Finnish landscape: as familiar as the ferries to Sweden or Grandma’s red-painted cottage in the country.
The same supermarket yellows, reds, and bright greens shout out at you in every town that has shrugged off village-status: it could be Anjalankoski, Nurmijärvi, Ähtäri, Keuruu, Kerava...
The bold primary colours make the place look clean and Western. No wonder, then, that McDonald’s uses them.
Over there stands an R-Kiosk in its warm yellow livery. The sight is a reminder, if we needed one, of what is the true heart of a community these days.
If you are lost, head for the R-Kiosk (increasingly pushing itself into convenience-store territory), where the flyers of the day’s tabloids throb with life and drama, where the pick’n’mix candies battle with warm takeaway cinnamon buns for the attention of your nostrils.
No, when you think about it, Finland isn’t in such bad shape.
The paintwork’s good, the buildings don’t lean and lurch. Lamp-posts and roadsigns are still upright.
But this Finland certainly bears no resemblance to that mythical land of spare, cool "Scandinavian" design and earthy broken colours that is displayed in the glossy publications the tourist finds in the seat-pocket on the Finnair flight to Helsinki.
"We have had created for us an image of a labryrinth of lakes, but have we ever seen them?"
If a child were to tell us what he saw in Finland, he would probably talk about the "big apples".
They are so familiar that nobody here pays any attention to them any more. First the giant apples covered the S-Market display windows, and now the other chains have their own apples and bananas; there has to be at least a basket of fruit plastered across the windows.
Fruit presumably signifies abundance, groaning shelves, living high on the hog. The idea is to brighten things up, I guess.
If something has grown as familiar as these fruits are to us adults, it becomes invisible to the eye.
As one walks down the street, say in Helsinki, one can often be accosted at bus-stops and on billboards by larger-than-life figures in their underwear, and yet hardly anybody pays them any mind.
Logos and trademarks grow in number, there are neon squiggles and advertisement totem-poles, and rows of flags fluttering in the breeze, and Finland is becoming more brightly-coloured than ever before.
And yet at the same time, these same urban areas are being overrun with willow thickets and unruly saplings. It is as if Finland would have gone out and bought herself a smart new outfit to wear, but not bothered to get her hair done for six months.
The brighter the colours, the more pallid the people who stand among them begin to look. Finland is starting to take on the same strange happy-sad expression that you see behind the painted face of a circus clown.
The National Romantics of the late 19th century and early 20th century taught us how we should look at Finland.
They took us to Koli, they stood us up on the ridge, and they showed us vistas where lakes gave way to islands, islands to lakes, lakes to islands, wooded to the far horizon, with the wisps of smoke of slash-and-burn cultivation rising from clearings.
In the tourist advertisements, aerial photographs showed us the labyrinthine patterns of lake and moraine shrines like Punkaharju in Savo, to the point where we began to believe WE had seen them, too.
In the 1970s, a pair of intrepid Italian postcard photographers, Dino Sassi and Giovanni Trimboli, travelled around Finland with their cameras.
They showed us that there is summer in Finnish cities and villages. The sun shone down fiercely from a blue sky dotted with fleecy fair-weather clouds.
The sky may not have always appeared 100% genuine, but it was certainly pretty to look at.
These Italian skyscapes became a success. We sent millions of these postcards to one another. We wanted to show how things could be.
But let’s face it, Finland doesn’t look that way. The Finnish weather is unsettled, it is often far from scorching hot, the sky is often a leaden battleship grey. The summers are short, the autumns long and rainy, the birch trees spend more than half of the year standing leafless.
Then Finland is just uncomfortably wet - and naked.
It is possible to drive through Finland without seeing so very many of those 180,000 lakes for which it supposedly famous.
The country is flat to the point of dullness, one seldom finds oneself in a high place with a view, and the watery landscapes are these days often hidden behind unkempt bushes and thickets.
"Wherever you may be, the skyline is formed by the saw-tooth of fir stands - we are a people surrounded by trees"
So let’s say you drive through Finland. What DO you see? A grey asphalt ribbon of road, with a dotted white line down the middle, and a solid line on the verges, left and right.
And yet it is always possible to say which country you are in.
It is the small things that count. Those lines at the edge of the road, they are solid, not pecked like in Sweden.
The roadsigns, too, give it away. Ours are a warm mix of red on yellow, whereas elsewhere in Europe they make do with insipid white backgrounds to the warnings.
Our "Road Works" man is more muscular, his shirt is off; the sign warning of children playing has the boy and girl striding out briskly. If you look closely, the Swedish road-signs have rounder corners.
There are a lot of rock cuttings, red granite bare on the surface. But once again, they are so familiar we don’t even see them. And when we come upon a direction sign with its kilometres, of course it is blue and white like the national flag: ORIVESI 36. It tells us we are in Finland.
There are forests on both sides of the highway: first shrub and bushes, then real trees. One can seldom see far in any direction except forwards or back the way we came.
Practically wherever you are in Finland, the skyline is formed by the saw-tooth of fir stands - a very Finnish horizon. Everywhere we go we are surrounded by trees, inside the woods.
Three-fourths of the land-area of Finland is forested. What sort of forests do we have hereabouts?
Dry, sandy, higher ground covered with pines, yes, groves of deciduous trees here and there beside bits of water, even. Planted stands of conifers, yes, but more commonly the roadsides feature overgrown spruce forest, often on damp, nutrient-rich moraine soil.
It is Finland’s most common natural scenery, in statistical terms.
In the Southern Finland experience, this means blueberry-picking woods. Southern Finland is one giant blueberry forest. The trees, the berries, the mosquitoes...
You know the drill: damp, mossy stumps of long-fallen trees, awkward hillocks, spider’s webs that cling to your face as you move forward.
In its natural state this woud be all spruce, but these days it also often carries planted pines in its midst. Let’s put it a little more baldly: it is fallen branches, brushwood, disbranched trunks, the crowns of saplings that are sprouting up, and it is almost impenetrable.
Damp, difficult, mixed forest. Doesn’t that sound like Finland?
You can smell it in your nostrils, and you can already almost hear the buzzing of those mosquitoes - especially around the tussocks that offer up the blue fruit.
So why is it, then, that this wet mixed forest we all know appears so seldom in the nature shots, on the picture postcards, or in the landscape artists’ work?
The Albert Edelfelts and the Eero Järnefelts and the Pekka Halonens of old spent their time and paints immortalising a different kind of forest: it had to be lofty and noble. It needed gloomy expressionist artists like Tyko Sallinen or his ill-tempered heir Aimo Kanerva to reveal to the world what the Finnish forest was really about.
And if we Finns have some common heritage in our sense of feeling, some sense of touch we share almost from the womb, it might well be the prick of a fir needle.
How does a sticky, resinous fir cone feel in the hand? Or a cold Finnish Abloy key, or a stiff, new Ässä instant lottery ticket? And how about the itch of a mosquito bite?
Already as children we learned how to walk in the woods in single file, watching out for the branches flicked back into our faces by the person in front.
A forest road, designed for timber transports, has been carved out between the trees, with stones and roots piled up on both sides of the 4-metre-wide carriageway.
If you make a parachute jump and land anywhere in Finland south of Sodankylä in Lapland, you will never wind up further than 2 kilometres from the nearest forest road. Northern Lapland is another matter.
There are 110,000 kilometres of forest roads in Finland, a great deal more than there are highways and byways. You can’t go deeper than two kilometres into the trees without coming out again.
That straight, gravel-shale forest road is a singularly Finnish landscape. Only you don’t see many pictures of it. Odd, that, don't you think?
"Every Finn knows how to light the sauna: just turn the timer clockwise"
One third of the land area of Finland is bog. Call it what you will - marsh, wetlands, fen, peat bog - Finland is at least the soggiest, boggiest place in Europe, if not in the entire world.
Finland is rubber-boot country.
Even though there may be many people living here who have never actually been to a bog, it is certain that every Finn has at sometime in their life owned a pair of wellies. I doubt you could say that about anywhere else.
There’s a good deal of precipitation. The snow falls and then it melts. It snows again, and it melts again. The sideways sleet soaks your feet. It is a very Finnish state of being.
Each and every one of us knows what it is to have the toes go numb from the damp cold, or when the ear-lobes start to pinch at minus 10.
There are many, many people in the world who have never experienced these things.
Finnish sounds: the bubbling, gurgling plop-plop of the coffee-maker as the water goes up and then down into the jug, the sharp ting as the microwave finishes its business, the insistent beep-beep, beep-beep of the incoming SMS message, the signature-tune of the evening YLE newscast.
Or that delicious first shudder as the Viking Line floating gin palace pulls out from its mooring in the South Harbour, or the constant tinkling sound from the shelves in the tax-free shop on board.
And then there is the sweet hissing exhalation as water hits the stones on the sauna stove, or the lazy clacking noise as an electric sauna stove heats up.
Every Finn knows how to light the sauna - you just twist the timer-dial a quarter-turn in the clockwise direction. And when you’re done sauna'ing, there is the scent of pizza in the parlour. Someone's ordered in.
Finnish smells are mostly kind on the nose; there is nothing wild there.
With the possible exception of Helsinki’s streets on May Eve, you do not have the acrid tang of urine. There is no stench of over-ripe fruit, and even the smells of stale cigarettes and sweaty armpits are becoming a rarity.
In fact in the dairy departments of the supermarkets, there is a very Finnish atmosphere: cool and faintly milk-scented.
Finland has turned into a country where even the rye bread is bought and sold in plastic wrap, ready-sliced.
Plastic rye bread in the land of electric saunas.
For all the bright colours on the supermarket windows, Finland is a dull, flat shade of blue these days. It is like its national beverage: a lightly roasted coffee with a dash of cold milk thrown on the top. A latter-day latte for the masses, something insipid to be sipped.
But then again, it is something that so many of us yearn for when we are away.
It is Sunday afternoon in Satakunta, out west. The sky hangs on the earth like a clinging child. Little towns - Karvia, Kankaanpää, Lavia, Äetsä - amidst the autumn landscape of grey, with white plastic-covered bales of hay like giant cheeses on the edges of the fields.
And it seems like only yesterday that a curlew was calling over the cold, flooded meadows here to say that spring was on its way.
We have returned to normalcy, things are back as they should be. That summer stuff, too much hustle and bustle and all for nought anyway. Who needs it?
Before long, we’ll be into the short winter days, a lukewarm sun brushing indifferently across the sky. Muddy, rime-covered cars, pale-faced children, the sweaty, fetid air of the supermarket check-outs, sore throats. But that’s how it is: who promised that life was going to be easy?
"Finland is a strange country: pallid and yet with a garishly painted face"
There is not a soul to be seen. The downtown area is deserted. Here in Alastaro (pop. around 3,000), there is not even a single customer in Murina, a restaurant in the centre. On a giant screen, an ice hockey match is in progress - the commentators don’t speak, they bellow. Only nobody is listening.
This is not a country where people gather and swarm in piazzas: Finland is turning inwards.
The kids are in webchats or tapping away on IRC, their mothers are at aerobics, and Dad fingers the TV remote control, surfing the channels to find more sport. Finally, the gentle glow of the television screen brings families together.
It is hard to shrug off the sense of melancholy, but then why should we? It is permitted here. And that’s what makes this an easy place to be, easy to be understood.
Finland is a country where the "How are you?" questions should elicit an understated response. It is not the way of the world outside.
It is not done hereabouts to preen and brag of one’s good fortune. Celebs do that, and before long we get to read of their misfortunes on the flyers outside the kiosk.
Hereabouts there is no internal compulsion to be happy and contented, at least not yet. We are not accustomed to loud declarations of our fleeting moments of pleasure or success.
The Finn is reticent about his happiness.
But today is polling day in the municipal elections. We are now in Nurmijärvi, home to the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister, just outside the outer ring road that designates the border between Helsinki and the wild.
Out here today one can see couples walking briskly towards the polling stations. Some of the houses have hoisted up flags to mark the occasion.
Nurmijärvi gives a taste of where Finland is going next. Houses are being built with neat lawns around them. Many of the dwellings are large, in the style of old Finnish manor-houses, and pastel colours are to the fore. Two cars stand in the yard.
The Prime Minister is right: this is how Finns want to bring up their children and cultivate their gardens.
People are looking to rediscover an Old Finland that disappeared not so long ago - but they are not going to find it.
What is going up here is the New Finland.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print in the December edition of Kuukausiliite, the newspaper’s monthly colour supplement
* Note: The more Ks, the bigger it is.
ILKKA MALMBERG AND MARKUS JOKELA / Helsingin Sanomat
ilkka.malmberg@hs.fi, markus.jokela@sanoma.fi
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| 8.12.2004 - THIS WEEK |
 WHAT DOES FINLAND REALLY LOOK LIKE? |
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