Finnish state visit to Norway in October

The Norwegian royal court and the office of the President of Finland today announced that the new Finnish President, Sauli Niinistö, and his wife Jenni Haukio will pay a state visit to Norway from 10 to 12 October. There will be the usual welcoming ceremony in the Palace Square, followed by lunch and a wreath-laying ceremony at the National Monument at Akershus Fortress. President Niinistö will then call on the First Vice-Speaker of Parliament, Øivind Korsberg, and the Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, while his wife will open an art exhibition. The King and Queen will give a state banquet in the evening, which will also be attended by the Crown Prince and Crown Princess and Princess Astrid.
The next day the President will give a lecture at the House of Literature and then attend a conference, while his wife, who is herself a poet, will remain longer at the House of Literature together with the Queen in order to get a presentation of Norwegian poetry. The Prime Minister will host a luncheon before the guests visit a school at Stovner. The day ends with a reception at the Opera House, hosted by the President and First Lady of Finland.
On the third and final day, the Finnish guests will visit Tromsø and attend engagements focusing on mutual Finnish-Norwegian issues concerning the Arctic area. Unusually, the King and Queen will not accompany their guests on the final day, as they always do, but delegate this task to the Crown Prince.
Sauli Niinistö was elected President of Finland in February, in succession to Tarja Halonen, and sworn in on 1 March. In keeping with Finnish tradition he made a state visit to Sweden shortly after his inauguration.

Norwegian state visit to Poland and Finnish state visit to Sweden

The Norwegian royal court has announced that the King and Queen will pay a state visit to President Bronislaw Komorowski of Poland from 9 to 11 May, spending two days in Warsaw and one in Cracow.
The King and Queen last made a state visit to Poland in 1996, when they were hosted by the then President Aleksander Kwasniewski and his wife Jolanta Kwasniewska.
The Kwasniewskis paid a state visit to Norway in 2003, while President Lech Walesa and his wife Danuta paid a state visit to Norway in 1995. The King was supposed to have attended the funeral of President Lech Kaczyński in April 2010, but was forced to cancel because of the ash cloud which grounded planes all over Europe.
It has also been announced that the new President of Finland, Sauli Niinistö, who was elected a month ago and sworn in on 1 March, will pay a state visit to Sweden on 17 and 18 April, accompanied by his wife Jenni Haukio.
It is customary that a new Finnish President makes a state visit to Sweden very shortly after his or her inauguration, reflecting the close relationship between the two countries which were one state for centuries until 1809.

Sauli Niinistö elected President of Finland

Yesterday’s second round of Finland’s presidential election saw the conservative candidate Sauli Niinistö elected the country’s twelfth president with a comfortable majority. Niinistö won 62.6 % of the votes as opposed to 37.4 % for Pekka Haavisto of the Green Party. With more than 1.8 million votes Niiniströ received more votes than his predecessors since direct elections of president were introduced in 1994. Electoral participation was, however, record low at a mere 68.9 %.
The election result is something of a watershed as it means that the President of Finland will, for the first time since 1982, not be a Social Democrat, and that, unusually, the President and the Prime Minister will belong to the same party.
In the first round of the election, held on 22 January, Sauli Niinistö won 36.96 % of the votes, while Pekka Haavisto received 18.76 % of the votes and thus narrowly bypassed Paavo Värynen of the Centre Party (17.53 %) as the second candidate in the second round. The Social Democrat candidate, former Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen, received only 6.7 % of the votes.
Sauli Väinämö Niinistö, who was born on 24 August 1948, is a jurist by profession and was an MP 1987-2003 and 2007-2011. He served as leader of the Conservative party 1994-2001, was Minister of Justice 1995-1996 and Minister of Finance 1996-2003. He was his party’s candidate in the 2006 presidential election and gave the incumbent President, Tarja Halonen, tough competition, winning 48.2 % of the votes against Halonen’s 51.8 %. From 2007 till 2011 he served as Speaker of Parliament. He will be sworn in as President on 1 March, when Tarja Halonen’s second six-year term comes to an end.
Widowed in 1995, Niinistö remarried in 2009 to Jenni Haukio. The incoming First Lady of Finland is 34 years old, a poet and head of communication of the Conservative party.
The once significant powers of the President have been cut in recent years, most recently in October last year. The role of the President is now mostly ceremonial, but he or she retains a modest influence in foreign policy. The political scientist Ann-Cathrine Jungar wrote an interesting essay (external link) on the development of the presidential office in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet yesterday.
The photo shows the Presidential Palace in Helsinki.

President of Iceland to stand down

The President of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, used his New Year speech to announce that he will not seek re-election to the office of President. After sixteen years as head of state he will thus leave office when his fourth and current term comes to an end on 1 August this year.
A political scientist by profession, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who will be 69 this year, was elected President with 41.4% of the votes in succession to Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in 1996. He was re-elected unopposed in 2000, won 67.5% of the votes cast in 2004 and again re-elected unopposed in 2008.
The role of President of Iceland is largely symbolical, but Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson has twice used his right to veto parliamentary legislation (and thus cause a referendum to be held), a right which none of his four predecessors had ever used.
The next President of Iceland will be elected by popular vote in June.
This means that both Nordic republics will get new heads of state this year, as the second term of the current President of Finland, Tarja Halonen, also expires this year and she is not constitutionally eligible for re-election.

At the road’s end: Count Conradin of Castell-Rüdenhausen (1933-2011), cousin of King Carl Gustaf

Yesterday the funeral of Count Conradin of Castell-Rüdenhausen, a first cousin of the King of Sweden, was held in Ingå Church in Finland. The Count died on 1 October, some days before his 78th birthday.
Born in Berlin on 10 October 1933, His Illustrious Highness Count Conradin Friedrich of Castell-Rüdenhausen was the second of three children born to Princess Caroline-Mathilde (Calma) of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in her first marriage to Count Friedrich-Wolfgang of Castell-Rüdenhausen. The parents divorced in 1938 and the father was killed when taking part in German air attacks on Britain in June 1940. Conradin was thus a nephew of Princess Sibylla of Sweden.
He moved to Finland to study horticulture and there he met Märta Lönegren, whom he married on 6 July 1961. The couple, who were thus able to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary earlier this year, were the parents of a daughter, Anne-Charlotte, and a son, named Carl-Eduard for his paternal great-grandfather, who lives in Denmark.
The late Count stayed in touch with his cousin King Carl Gustaf, but lead a private life at Ingå, where the family ran a plant nursery.

New books: Nikolaj II of Finland

It is not very often that I read Finnish books, the obvious explanation being the utterly incomprehensible Finnish language. But occasionally Finnish books are also published in the minority language Swedish, which is the case with Jorma and Päivi Tuomi-Nikula’s new biography Nikolaj II – Storfursten av Finland about the last Grand Prince of Finland, perhaps better known as Emperor Nikolaj II of Russia.
201 years ago Russia defeated Sweden and took Finland, which became an autonomous Grand Duchy (Grand Principality would have been a more accurate English translation) under the Russian Emperor. In their book, the Tuomi-Nikulas have wanted to look at who the person Nikolaj II was and to weave this together with the history of his reign in Finland. They have succeeded in producing a highly readable as well as informative biography.
The story of Nikolaj II’s life is well-known from a multitude of books published in the 92 years since his execution, but few of his previous biographers have given much thought to Finland.
The authors argue that the popularity of the emperors had never been greater in Finland than in 1894, a year which had seen the festive unveiling of the statue of the beloved Alexander II in Helsinki, followed by mourning for Alexander III and rejoicing for the new emperor. Nikolaj II had already visited Finland five times before his accession and his promise to respect Finland’s autonomy and privileges was well-received by the Finns. But only five years later, the Finns would utter the name of Nikolaj II as a curse.
There was soon disappointment that the new emperor did not follow his father’s tradition of holidaying in Finland every summer, but the greatest trouble was caused by the attempts at integrating Finland more fully into the Russian Empire.
This policy was to be carried out by Nikolaj Ivanovich Bobrikov, who was appointed Governor-General of Finland in 1898. Bobrikov intended to introduce Russian laws in Finland and to make sure that Russian was the language used in public administration. In 1899 the Emperor issued a manifesto saying that he could make decisions about laws regarding mutual Finnish and Russian concerns without consulting the Finnish national assembly. This was seen as contradicting the promise he gave upon his accession to respects the laws of Finland and 1899 entered Finnish history as the year of the violation of the oath.
He followed up by banning separate Finnish stamps from being used and the abolishment of a separate Finnish army in 1900, which meant that Finnish soldiers could now be sent anywhere on behalf of Russia. In 1903 Bobrikov was given dictatorial powers for three years, which meant that he could ban meetings, dissolve associations and exile people as he pleased.
The assassination of Bobrikov in June 1904 (the murderer was hailed as a national hero) was followed by a wave of political murders and crimes. But the Finns also found more peaceful and cleverer ways of making their point – such as telling Bobrikov that the façade of the House of the Estates needed to be repaired, only to put up a relief showing Alexander I in his role as the Emperor who had granted Finland its privileges, which the Governor-General could not really protest against.
Or they covered the statue of Alexander II (“the liberator”) in flowers as a silent protest at the current Russian policy. Bobrikov forbade the press to print photos of the flower-bedecked monument, but the Finns issued the photos as postcard. One of the best of the many excellent illustrations in this book is such a postcard, where a group of people “happens” to be standing next to the monument smiling gleefully at the photographer.
The wave of politically motivated crime around 1905 was eventually followed by a détente, which coincided with the smaller Russian revolution of 1905 and increasing acts of terrorism on Russian soil. This caused the imperial family finally to begin to spend their summer holidays in Finland, which they continued to do until 1914 – the authors point out the irony in Nikolaj II accusing the Finns in his speech from the throne in 1908 of not being friendly enough towards Russia and its government while at the same time realising that Finland was the part of his realm where he was probably most safe.
However, the détente did not last. In 1909 Nikolaj II dissolved the Finnish national assembly as a reaction to its Speaker Pehr Evind Svinhufvud having criticised the way the Russian government dealt with Finnish matter and in 1910 he issued a manifesto which gave all Russian citizens the same rights in Finland as Finns, which was seen as another attempt at russification of Finland.
The outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 saw the Dowager Empress Maria Fjodorovna, who described herself as “Finland’s best and most faithful friend” and had been staunchly opposed to her son’s Finnish policy, travelling back to St Petersburg through Finland and being greeted with ovations and great warmth by the Finns. This, the authors write, was also a reminder to the Emperor that he might have shared in his mother’s popularity were it not for his repressive acts against Finland.
However, the outbreak of war led to the Finns’ old loyalty towards the Emperor being re-awakened, but this did not last to the end of the year, when plans for russifying Finland entirely were revealed. From then on the name of Nikolaj II again became a curse and it was widely hoped in Finland that Germany would defeat Russia.
In March 1915 Nikolaj II visited Helsinki for a single day. He would never see the Grand Duchy again. The Finns declared their independence on 6 December 1917 and were recognised by Lenin on 30 December. Prince Friedrich Karl of Hesse-Cassel was elected King of Finland, but he renounced his throne following the German defeat in WWI without ever having set foot in his kingdom.
The authors show sympathy in their portrayal of Nikolaj II, but make no secret of his failures and shortcomings. Altogether they have succeeded in writing a book which deepens one’s understanding both of why Russian rule over Finland failed and why the Romanov dynasty did not survive.

My latest article: A book on guilt

In Klassekampen’s book magazine today you can read my review article of the Norwegian translation of Henrik Arnstad’s very interesting and thought-provoking book Skyld – En europeisk reise i Nazi-Tysklands skygge, which investigates how three countries which were Nazi Germany’s allies (Finland, Italy and Austria) have subsequently dealt with the issue of their own guilt. I reviewed the Swedish original here at the blog seven months ago.

Female prime minister for Finland

At the Finnish Centre Party’s congress today Mari Kiviniemi was elected leader of the party in succession to Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen. In the second round Kiviniemi defeated Mauri Pekkarinen with 1,357 votes to 1,035.
41-year-old Mari Kiviniemi, since 2007 Minister of Public Administration and Local Government, will thus also become Prime Minister of Finland when Vanhanen resigns in a week or so. Thus Finland will again be in the unusual position of having women as both head of state and head of government.
Kiviniemi will be the second female prime minister of Finland, following Anneli Jääteenmäki, who was in office for two months in 2003 before she was forced to resign over allegations that she had lied to Parliament about how she acquired secret documents on the Iraq war for use in her election campaign (she was acquitted at the subsequent trial and is currently an MEP).

New books: Nazi Germany’s allies and the question of guilt

In 2006 the Swedish journalist Henrik Arnstad published his biography of Christian Günther, the country’s wartime foreign minister who bears much of the responsibility for the country’s somewhat too friendly attitude towards Nazi Germany during the first years of World War II. This policy has come under debate in Sweden in recent decades, and in his new book, Skyldig till skuld – En europeisk resa i Nazitysklands skugga, Arnstad looks at how the countries which were Nazi Germany’s actual allies have dealt with the question of their own share in the guilt.
He argues that the Axis countries’ collective memories are often very selective and that some of them have chosen to cast themselves in the role as victims rather than facing their own crimes. The fact that Germany has taken on the guilt issue so openly that the collective sense of responsibility is ever present in that country has in Arnstad’s view contributed to making it more difficult for other countries to do so – or easier to avoid doing so.
Finland is the prime example, according to Arnstad. The national hero Marshal Mannerheim was a “war criminal – responsible for concentration camps, ethnic cleansing and mass murder”. The book offers a detailed background for these charges, and Arnstad points out that Finland in cooperation with Germany planned and carried out the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.
Following the war Finland’s view of its own wartime history has been characterised by concerns for the nation’s honour being put above truth. Rather than taking to task their country’s crimes, the Finns prefer to remember the more glorious Winter War of 1939-1940 and have indulged in debates such as if Finland and Germany were not really allied but just happened to fight a common enemy. Arnstad dismisses such notions and concludes that Finland in reality was Germany’s most important ally.
In Rome Henrik Arnstad found the “Liberation Museum” (Museo Storico della Liberazione) symptomatic of how Italy sees its role in the war. The museum is concerned solely with the allied “liberation” of Italy in 1943 and the German atrocities committed on Italian soil during the next two years. Italy’s own alliance with Nazi Germany before that is simply ignored.
To select only one part of one’s story and thereby being able to cast oneself in the role of victim is something which has also been done in Austria, a country where the denials had to be faced when the old Nazi Kurt Waldheim was elected President in 1986. But the idea that Austria was “Hitler’s first victim” still prevails and as recently as 2008 Otto von Habsburg said that “no country in Europe has a greater right than Austria to call itself a victim”. Arnstad sees these ideas in relation with the growing right-wing extremism in both Italy and Austria.
Henrik Arnstad’s book is thought-provoking and an important contribution to the fight against historical forgetfulness. It might however have been interesting if he had also included Spain and how that country is currently trying to come to terms with its Fascist past.

On this date: A president resigns – and dies

Many presidential resignations have come as a result of great personal or political drama, but few have ended in such drama as Kyösti Kallio’s. Kallio had become President of Finland in 1937 and was still in office when the Soviet Union attacked Finland in 1939. As the leader of a small country which had been attacked by a great power, Kallio received much sympathy when he travelled abroad to plead his country’s case and when he, in a radio speech, appealed to the world to support Finland.
By then the President’s health was causing grave concerns. Kallio had suffered a major heart attack in 1939, and in November 1940 he announced that he would be resigning out of health reasons. Because of the turbulent world situation a regular presidential election was not held, but the electoral college of the previous presidential election (1937) was reassembled. On 19 December 1940 it elected Prime Minister Risto Ryti President.
Shortly thereafter, Kallio, no longer President of Finland, left the Presidential Palace and drove to Helsinki’s railway station, where a train was waiting to take him back home to Nivala. And there, on the platform, right in front of the guard of honour, the band playing a march, Kyösti Kallio collapsed and died. The photo (now in the public domain) was taken by Hugo Sundström just seconds before.

Swedish historian suggests new Kalmar union

Today the Nordic Council began its annual session, which this year is held in Stockholm. In an article in Dagens Nyheter the Swedish historian and author Gunnar Wetterberg takes it as an opportunity to suggest a radical strengthening of Nordic cooperation; indeed he proposes that the five Nordic countries should form a federal state, a modern version of the Kalmar union which existed from 1397 to 1523 (when Sweden broke away).
Wetterberg points out that the five Nordic countries together would be the tenth largest economy in the world, “just behind Canada and Spain but well ahead of Brazil and Russia”. This, Wetterberg argues, would give such a federal state a stronger voice on the world stage and strengthen its position in the EU (however, neither Norway nor Iceland is a member of the EU). Wetterberg also sees advantages for business and industry, culture and literature, education and science.
Gunnar Wetterberg suggests that the Nordic federal state should have a bicameral system, consisting of a lower house based on proportional representation and a senate whose composition would be less influenced by the sizes of the five countries. There should be one head of state, he argues, and points to Queen Margrethe II (apparently for the simple reason that the first monarch of the Kalmar union was Queen Margareta I), alternatively a Malaysian system whereby the position of head of state would revolve between the five states.
The federal state should be in charge of foreign policy, security, finances, laws, immigration, work, education and science. Schoolchildren should have to learn another Nordic language in addition to their own and official acts should be published in two languages – Finnish and one of the Scandinavian tongues. National laws should be harmonised gradually, Wetterberg suggests.
Wetterberg concludes that he thinks his idea is “fully realistic”. However, this is certainly not on the agenda in any of the Nordic countries and is highly unlikely to become an issue. However, Gunnar Wetterberg’s argument that the Nordic countries combined would be the tenth largest economy in the world reflects the idea of a shared G20 membership recently put forward by the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.
There have overall been several ideas concerning a closer Nordic cooperation put forward recently. Following the collapse of the Icelandic economy a monetary union between Norway and Iceland was mentioned as an alternative to Icelandic membership of the EU and a panel led by Norway’s former Foreign Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg recently suggested a closer military cooperation between the Nordic countries. Another interesting development in inter-Nordic relations is that Denmark in recent years apparently has lost some interest and grown less committed to such issues.

The article in its entirety may be found here:
http://www.dn.se/opinion/debatt/de-fem-nordiska-landerna-bor-ga-ihop-i-en-ny-union-1.982761

What to see: The Dano-Nordic pavilion, the 53rd Biennale, Venice

Some days ago I wrote about the 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale, in Venice. I should also include something about the Norwegian contribution, which is in fact a pan-Nordic one. The Nordic pavilion (Sweden, Norway and Finland) is located next to the Danish and for this Biennale they have joined forces for the exhibition “The Collectors”, curated and staged by the Norwegian duo Elmgreen & Dragset and with 24 artists participating.
The two pavilions are furnished as a deserted home where some sort of disaster with homoerotic undertones has struck and is as such reminiscent of the exhibition “Home is the place you left” at Trondheim Art Gallery last year.
To the left in the first photo are several pictures by Tom of Finland, while “Maquette for a Giant Spinning O” by Jonathan Monk can be seen outside the windows. In the second photo is “Butterflies” by Han & Him, while the third shows the painting “The act of pollination” by Herman Bas and the fourth two Polynesian sculptures lent by Francesca von Habsburg.
In the fifth photo is a detail of “Table for Bergman” by Elmgreen & Dragset. Then comes the staircase in the library and the mirror in the hallway and finally “Death of a Collector”, also by Elmgreen & Dragset.

What to see: The National Library, Helsinki

The National Library of Finland (formerly the University Library) is often counted among the best – if not simply the best – of the many public buildings in Helsinki erected by the Prussian-born architect Carl Ludvig Engel (1778-1840) in the years after the Finnish capital was moved there from Turku (Åbo) in 1812, the University following in 1828.
“It is as splendid as the Senate Building but it has a dignified mightiness of a quite other sort, a lofty tranquillity of forms which one does not encounter earlier in his more richly decorated works”, the art historian Nils Erik Wickberg wrote about the library. Engel himself wrote to his nephew in 1833: “When this building is once completed, there will be not one university in Europe which will have a more beautiful library”.
Situated at Union Street opposite the entrance to the Cathedral of Helsinki and next to the University Building, the National Library was built between 1836 and 1840. However the interior decoration took such a long time that it was only in 1845 that the library could be taken in use.
From the main entrance one enters through a vestibule into the library’s central room, the Cupola Hall, which was inspired by Roman baths (photo 4). It is surmounted by a cupola which is 21 metres high (photo 5). On either side it is flanked by two long, rectangular, barrel-vaulted reading rooms – the North Hall can be seen in the sixth picture, the South Hall in the seventh. All three rooms are surrounded by stucco marble columns and together they “make up the most beautiful suite of rooms in the secular architecture of Finland”, Wickberg wrote.
The painted decorations on the vaults were added only in 1881, but correspond quite well with Engel’s ideas. In 1906-1907 the building was supplemented by an annex, the Rotunda, at the rear of the building. The Rotunda is by the architect Gustaf Nyström and blends in beautifully with Engel’s architecture. Underground storage rooms were built in 1950s and in 2000 and today the neighbouring Fabiania building is also at the National Library’s disposal.

Notable architects: Carl Ludvig Engel (1778-1840)

Carl Ludvig Engel is best remembered as the creator of Helsinki’s beautiful neoclassical centre. His empire architecture has often been considered a branch of Prussian neoclassicism, but, as the late art historian Nils Erik Wickberg stressed, there is also a significant Russian influence. Engel visited St Petersburg in 1813 and in 1815-1816.
Engel was born and educated in Berlin, but following Prussia’s defeat by Napoléon in 1805/1806 prospects in his native country seemed bleak. Engel therefore went eastwards to try his luck in Tallinn, where he became town architect. A few years later he received some commissions in Turku, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland.
In 1812 Emperor Alexander I moved the Grand Duchy’s capital to Helsinki, which had been the victim of a great fire a few years before. In 1814 Engel came into contact with Johan Albrecht Ehrenström, the chairman of the Commission for the Rebuilding of Helsinki, who soon asked Engel to come and use his skills in Helsinki.
Engel arrived in 1816 and stayed until his death in 1840, although he sometimes contemplated going back to Prussia. Ehrenström had planned the new capital; Engel came to build it. He wrote to a friend back in Prussia: “My dearest wish seems to be granted; I get an almost unlimited field on which to use my gifts, something which only a few architects are granted, and I can count myself among those happy, as the luck to build an entire town is something very unusual”.
The first picture shows an evening view of Senate Square, which became the focal point of the new city. At its eastern end is the Senate House (1818-1822), which is still the seat of the Finnish government; at the corner is the Bock House which Engel rebuilt as the residence of the Governor General (1817-1819).
Towering over the Square is the Cathedral (1830-1852), seen in the second picture, which was not completed until after Engel’s death and then altered in a way he would not have approved of.
At the west end of the Senate Square, as a pendant to the Senate House, is the University House (1828-1832), seen in the third picture. In the fourth photo is the Union Street; the University House can be seen on the left, followed by the National Library of Finland (1836-1844) and the buildings of the former Cantonist School (1823-1825), which are now used by the University.
In the fifth picture is the former Society House (1831-1833), now the City Hall. The sixth photo shows the Naval Barracks (1817-1820, last parts built 1986-1989) at Katajanokka (Skatudden in Swedish) which is now the offices of the Foreign Ministry.
The seventh photo is the Othodox church of St Alexandra the Martyr in Turku (Åbo) (1838-1846) and finally a former noble mansion in Tallinn (1809-1814), which is now the office of the Chancellor of Justice.
Among Engel’s many other buildings in Helsinki are the Guards Barracks (1820-1822, now the Ministry of Defence), the Astronomical Observatory (1831-1833), the Old Church (1825-1826) and the Orthodox Church of Holy Trinity (1825-1826).

What to see: The Parliament Building, Helsinki

The Parliament of Finland was established in 1906, eleven years before the country achieved independence from Russia, and replaced the four estates which had made up the country’s Diet. This necessitated a new building, as neither the House of the Estates or the House of Nobility, where the Diet had met, was big enough to accommodate a unicameral parliament.
Eliel Saarinen, one of Finland’s most famous architects, won the initial competition for the design of a parliament building, but his project was never carried out. A second competition in 1924 resulted in the current Parliament Building, designed by the architect Johan Sigfrid Sirén (1889-1961). The building process started in 1926 and the house was inaugurated on 7 March 1931.
Sirén’s Parliament Building is one of the most prominent examples of the “retroclassicism” which was popular in the Nordic countries in the 1920s and 1930s. The main façade, built of reddish granite, is entirely dominated by fourteen slim Corinthian columns, while the mostly classicist interiors also have touches of art deco and functionalism.
The Session Hall, where Parliament meets, lies at the centre of the building. The circular room has seats for the 200 MPs and is topped by a yellow dome with an oculus, supported by tall Corinthian columns. The Session Hall runs through three floors and has public galleries on two levels. Behind the Speaker’s seat is Wäinö Aaltonen’s five sculptures “The Pioneer”, “The Toil of Thought”, “The Future”, “Faith” and “The Harvester”.
Besides the Session Hall the most imposing room in the Parliament Building is the Hall of State, with floors and window recesses made of Swedish and Italian marble. In the hall there are busts of five Speakers of Parliament who went on to become Presidents of Finland.
Like most national assemblies the Finnish Parliament has needed more space with the years and has been extended in 1978 and 2004. Today there are six buildings which all in all cover some 56 000 square metres.
The pictures show the Parliament Building’s main façade to Mannerheim Street; the façades’ colonnade; the MPs’ seats and the public galleries in the Session Hall; the Hall of State; a detail of the columns and ceiling in the cafeteria; and the marble staircase.

Exhibition on Alexander I in Turku

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Peace of Fredrikshamn in 1809 when Sweden lost Finland to Russia following the disastrous war of 1808-1809. To mark the anniversary the Castle in Finland’s former capital Turku (Åbo in Swedish) has an exhibition on Emperor Alexander I of Russia, who became Grand Duke of Finland in 1809.

The exhibition is called “Aleksanteri I – Hurmuri ja hallitsija” (“Alexander I – Charmör och kejsare” in Swedish) and lasts until 4 October this year. To accompany the exhibition there is a catalogue edited by Marita Söderström with texts in Finnish, Swedish and Russian.
The pictures show Turku Castle and a detail of one of many replicas of François Gérard’s portrait of Alexander I. This copy used to hang in the Supreme Court in Helsinki and is now in the National Museum of Finland.

(The National Museum of Finland’s grand exhibition on the events of 1809 closed last Sunday, but will open at the Royal Armoury in Stockholm in June.)

Some information on Turku Castle's website:

http://www.turku.fi/Public/default.aspx?contentid=82295

What to see: The Presidential Palace, Helsinki

Facing Helsinki’s harbour is a string of notable buildings, many of them in the empire style. To the far right is the Presidential Palace, which was originally a private mansion, built by Pehr Granstedt (1746-1828) for the merchant Johan Henrik Heidenstrauch in 1816-1820. Granstedt was a fortifications officer-turned-amateur architect and his drawings were changed and corrected first by Giacomo Quarenghi and then by Carl Ludvig Engel.
At the same time an imperial palace was being planned in Helsinki, which was first meant to be situated where the Cathedral now is. Other options were also proposed, but in the end the state purchased Heidenstrauch's mansion in 1837 and turned it into an imperial palace, the official residence of the Emperor or Russia as Grand Duke of Finland.
The job of transforming the mansion into a palace worthy of the Emperor was given to Carl Ludvig Engel, who had already been the architect of most of Helsinki’s beautiful empire centre. Engel demolished the timber storehouses located at the back of the palace and replaced them with an entire new wing.
The work on the new imperial palace was completed in 1845, five years after Engel’s death. It was however only in 1851 that a member of the imperial family, namely the future Emperor Alexander II, came to stay at the Palace. As Emperor-Grand Duke he came to Helsinki three times (in 1856, 1863 and 1876) and stayed at the Palace every time. The last Emperor to stay at the palace was Alexander III, who came with his family in 1885. In 1915 his son, Nikolay II, made his only visit to Helsinki as Emperor, but chose to stay in his railway carriage rather than at his Finnish palace.
With the 1906 introduction of a unicameral parliament in stead of an assembly of the four estates a new throne room was needed and another wing was added at the back side in 1904-1907, designed by the architect Jac. Ahrenberg.
During the final years of the First World War the Palace served as a military hospital. After the fall of the monarchy it became briefly the seat of the executive committee of the Russian Soldiers' and Workers' Soviet, but it was damaged by German bombs in April 1918. Following the election of Prince Friedrich Karl of Hesse-Cassel as King of newly independent Finland the Palace was restored by the architect Gustaf Strengell and the interior designer Harry Röneholm in anticipation of the King's arrival.
In the end the King never came and it was decided that the Palace should be the official residence of the President of the Republic of Finland and some alterations to the building were carried out in 1919-1922. The last but one president actually to live in the Presidential Palace was Juho Kusti Paasikivi, who served as president 1946-1956. His successor, Urho Kekkonen, was disturbed by the heavy traffic outside the Palace and after half a year he chose to live at the villa Tamminiemi (Ekudden in Swedish), which had been donated to the state for the President’s use in 1940.
Kekkonen also had his office at Tamminiemi and only came to the Presidential Palace once a week to receive visitors. When Kekkonen resigned due to illness in 1982 he was allowed to stay at Tamminiemi for the rest of his life and his successor Mauno Koivisto therefore moved into a flat in the Palace while a new presidential villa was being built.
The current President, Tarja Halonen, and her husband live at this new villa, Mäntyniemi (Talludden), which was built between 1989 and 1993 by the architects Reima and Raili Pietilä. President Halonen does however have her office at the Palace, which is also where she hosts a grand gala reception on Independence Day (6 December) each year. Visiting heads of state will also appear with President Halonen on the Palace’s balcony, as when she received Russia’s President on a state visit earlier today.
The Palace’s grandest room is the Hall of Mirrors, a grand conception with Corinthian columns carrying a gallery which goes all the way around the hall. Guided tours of the Palace used to be arranged, but today it is no longer open to visitors. A virtual tour of the Palace is on the other hand available at the President's official website:

http://www.presidentti.fi/netcomm/news/ShowArticle.asp?intNWSAID=34190&LAN=FI