Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  As I trudged through the town, there were white piles of clean snow on the verges and brown piles of dirty snow along the kerbs. Winter turns orderly Nordic streets into messy thoroughfares. The pavements were slippery and uneven. Trees, in parks and in gardens, looked ghostly in their white coats. Conifers slouched beneath the frozen burden of their branches.

  From somewhere nearby I could hear the ploughs still working their way through the town, mounding up the snow, as they did day after day. It is a Sisyphean task, this constant clearing of the streets. The snow falls and is shifted out of the way. More falls and that is shifted, too. Time and money are swallowed just pushing snow around, from one place to another. The Finns talk of sisu, a kind of stoic perseverance in the face of adversity. It is a stubbornness and a refusal to give in that is considered a personal quality as well as something of a national trait. And perhaps this might be an example of sisu right here: the men in their ploughs each morning and the families clearing drives and pathways with broad-mouthed shovels, then doing it all over again tomorrow. Over and over again tomorrow. Despite its practical necessity, this heroic repetition still feels faintly absurd and overwhelming. But perhaps, as Albert Camus concluded, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’.

  Although there has most likely been a settlement in this area since at least the thirteenth century, the town of Ekenäs was officially born in the winter of 1546, by royal decree. At that time, as for much of its history, Finland was under the control of its neighbour to the west, and when the Swedish king, Gustav Vasa, decided to create a new town to compete for trade with Tallinn (then called Reval), Ekenäs was chosen to be that town. Money, materials and men were sent to the region to make the development as swift and effective as possible. And so it grew. But Gustav was not a patient man, and when Ekenäs failed after five years to live up to his expectations, he founded Helsinki a little further north, and concentrated his efforts there instead. Many of this town’s early residents were ordered to relocate to the new settlement, and were not allowed to return until after Gustav’s death.

  For centuries, fishing was the main industry here, alongside the export of cattle, timber and animal hides. Craftsmen too began to congregate in the area – tailors, weavers, tanners, cobblers – and in the higgledy-piggledy lanes of the old town, streets still carry the names of the professions they once housed. There is Hattmakaregatan (hat-makers’ street), Smedsgatan (smiths’ street), Linvävaregatan (linen-weavers’ street), Handskmakaregatan (glove-makers’ street). The buildings too are named after the fish and animals that once would have driven the local economy: the eel house, the goat house, the bream, the roach and the herring.

  Some mornings, Ekenäs felt stripped out, almost absent from itself, as though in winter the town didn’t fully exist at all. I enjoyed exploring at those times, walking back and forth through the hushed streets, past the same shop windows and the same houses. Sometimes I walked out to the edge of town, where the trees took over, then turned back. I crossed the bridge to the little island of Kråkholmen, then turned again and headed to the Town Hall Square, where the sweet tang of antifreeze rose like cheap perfume from the parked cars.

  At night things were quieter still. Parents and grandparents dragged young children on sleds through the town centre, the snow lit like lemon ice beneath the streetlamps’ glow. A few walkers, dog walkers, youths, couples and me: it was peaceful, and pleasant to be out. Only later on was the stillness broken, when boy racers practised handbrake turns at the icy junction outside my hotel, their cars spinning and sliding from one side of the road to the other.

  Quietest of all, though, were the narrow streets and lanes of the old town, where footsteps creaked like leather on the trampled snow. Along Linvävaregatan, the oldest section, many of the houses were painted that earthy, Swedish red, with white window panels and features, while on nearby streets the boards were pastel blue, peach, olive and butterscotch. In the garden of one of these houses, a male bullfinch, bright ochre-breasted, seemed almost aware of how perfectly he fitted in this colourful corner. The brightness of the town was completed by strings of Christmas lights slung over windows and trees. Though it was already mid-January, Yule wreaths were displayed on front doors, and electric candle bridges were arched behind glass. In Britain we rush to remove our seasonal decorations, to maintain an arbitrary tradition. Here, though, lights and candles are kept in place. They feel like a natural response to the cold and darkness, not just for Christmas but for the whole winter.

  In a narrow lane in the old town, I stood one evening outside the small, square windows of a house. On the vertical weatherboards, the red paint was flaking away, leaving scars of age on the warped wood. Inside, there was no light, but I thought that I could make out two pictures hanging on the far wall: one a painting of a sailing ship, the other of a snowbound landscape. I could see only a few details of the room, but not the room itself. It looked abandoned, as though no one had been in there for years. It was an empty house that held a piece of the past intact. I am not sure what prompted me to want to take a photograph of this window. Perhaps it was the incompleteness of it, and the suggestion that, somehow, what lay beyond the glass was not entirely of the present. I wondered, maybe, if the lens might capture what I could not see, if it might illuminate the fragments and make them whole. But as I lifted the camera from my bag there was a movement inside, a shadow that crossed the space between me and those paintings. It looked like a person shuffling past in the darkness. I jumped back, as though I’d been caught doing something terrible, then turned and walked on, feeling guilty and unsettled. As the moments passed I found myself uncertain about what exactly I’d seen. Had there been a person there or had I only imagined it? I still can’t say for certain.

  Until the twentieth century, Finland had never existed as a nation, only as a culturally distinct region under the control of one or other of its powerful neighbours. Sweden occupied the territory from the mid-twelfth century up until the beginning of the nineteenth, but after the Napoleonic wars it was ceded to Russia, and became a semi-autonomous ‘grand duchy’. In the century that followed, a cultural and political nationalism began to grow in the population. Although the Finnish parliament opened its doors in 1905 (and was the first in Europe to offer universal suffrage), it was not until more than a decade later that the country truly became a country. In the wake of the Russian revolution, Finland declared independence in December 1917, and despite the violence it had suffered at Russian hands in the past, it did not, in the end, have to fight for that independence. Lenin, who had spent time in hiding here from the tsarist authorities back in St Petersburg, was a supporter of Finnish nationalism, and one of his earliest acts as leader was to let the grand duchy go. Had his own history been a little different, the history of this country might also have been so. Though a short, bloody civil war ensued, between those who wished to emulate the new Russian socialism and those in favour of a monarchy, the country ultimately settled on neither, becoming instead an independent democratic republic.

  Finland is often described as a strange place, one of the most culturally alien of European states, and in a sense that fact is remarkable. For despite being dominated from outside until just a century ago, this country always maintained an identity that was very much its own. That identity, and that very real sense of difference, was founded first of all upon linguistics. Contrary to a common misrepresentation, Finland is not a Scandinavian country, and its language is entirely unrelated either to those of its Nordic neighbours or to Russian. In fact, Finnish is not an Indo-European language at all. It is Uralic, and related therefore to Estonian and, more distantly, to Hungarian and Sami. However, this cultural odd-one-outness is complicated by the fact that, in parts of Finland, Swedish still predominates, with around five per cent of the population using it as their first language. This southwest region is one of those parts. Ekenäs is a Swedish town, and its Finnish name – Tammisaari – is far less commonly used by its residents. In cafés here, bot
h languages rise from the tables, and nearly every sign, label and menu is printed both in Finnish and Swedish. This biculturalism is different from that of Greenland. For though they once would have been, these are no longer the dual languages of coloniser and colonised. These are two cultures existing side by side, complementary rather than competing. And the difference between the two is not one of national allegiance, either. Swedish speakers in Ekenäs do not consider themselves to be Swedes living in Finland but, rather, Swedish-speaking Finns. To me this seems a refreshing contrast to the simplistic vision of a national identity that is ethnically and culturally defined. It is an acknowledgement that identity – even linguistic identity – is always complicated. But of course, not everyone agrees.

  In the centre of town, a row of boards displayed campaign posters for each of the eight presidential candidates in the forthcoming elections. These candidates included a representative of the Swedish People’s Party, which fights to protect the interests of Swedish speakers, and also a candidate from the True Finns, a nationalist group hostile both to immigrants and to the Swedish minority. Supporters of the True Finns resent the continuing use of Swedish as an official second language, and its compulsory teaching in schools. They thrive on a lingering bitterness over the country’s historical mistreatment by its neighbour. On a Friday night during my stay, in an act of quiet political sabotage, one of the True Finns’ posters was removed from its board, and the face of their leader, Timo Soini, was torn from the other, leaving a blank hole that drew laughs of approval from shoppers the following morning. Though replacement posters had been put up by Saturday evening, those did not make it through the night unscathed either. Once again Soini’s face was removed from one, while on the other a neat Hitler moustache was added. In a place as clean and graffiti-free as this, such vandalism was notable. Ekenäs clearly was not natural territory for the party.

  In most nations, urban, literate culture has traditionally been valued more highly than rural or peasant culture, and Finland was once no different. But here, up until the nineteenth century, the culture of the town was Swedish, while the culture of the countryside was not. Finns were largely excluded from urban, economic life, and theirs for the most part was an oral culture, a culture of the home, the fields and the forest. After the annexation by Russia in 1809, however, things began to change. For the first time there was a sense that this rural culture could become a national one, and since they were keen to minimise Swedish influence in the territory, the Russians did nothing to discourage this new nationalism. And so, gradually, it grew.

  Key to the rise of a rural, national, Finnish culture was the publication in the middle of the nineteenth century of a work of epic poetry called The Kalevala. This huge book, consisting of almost 23,000 lines, was based on the oral verse of the Karelia region, and was collected, collated and expanded by Elias Lönnrot, a doctor, who began his schooling in Ekenäs in 1814. Lönnrot brought together creation myths and heroic tales in a work of folklore and of literature. It was a deliberate attempt to set down a national narrative, comparable to the Icelandic sagas and Homeric epics. And though The Kalevala is less famous internationally than those predecessors, there is no doubt that within his own country Lönnrot succeeded. The book had an extraordinary influence, politically and culturally, and continues to do so even now. A national day of celebration, Kalevala Day, is held each 28th of February.

  The oral poetry of Finland persisted into the nineteenth century not despite the fact that it was a suppressed language but because of it. The verses Lönnrot gathered were a kind of treasure that had been kept safe from harm in homes and villages across the region. And likewise, the survival of Finnish as a language and as a culture was possible precisely because its rural heartland was separate from the urban heartland of Swedish. The result of this geographical divergence was that, as a national culture came to be imagined and created, it was the countryside that was at its core. It was the landscape of Finland – the forests, lakes and islands – that shaped the nation’s art, its music and its literature.

  Though his first language was Swedish, Jean Sibelius was a fervent Finnish nationalist, and throughout his career he produced work directly inspired by The Kalevala. But it was nature that provided the energy and imagery that moved him most of all. It was that ‘coming to life’, he wrote, ‘whose essence shall pervade everything I compose’. While working on his Fifth Symphony – the last movement of which was the only music to be heard in Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North – Sibelius wrote that its adagio would be that of ‘earth, worms and heartache’. And seeing swans fly overhead one day he found the key to that symphony’s finale: ‘Their call the same woodwind type as that of cranes, but without tremolo,’ he wrote. ‘The swan-call closer to trumpet … A low refrain reminiscent of a small child crying. Nature’s Mysticism and Life’s Angst! … Legato in the trumpets!’ Gould, hearing this music in his native Canada, recognised something distinctively northern about it, something that chimed with the themes he wished to explore. It was, he said, ‘the ideal backdrop for the transcendental regularity of isolation’.

  On the broad pier down at the north harbour, summer restaurants stood abandoned, their outside tables, chairs and umbrellas deformed beneath six inches of snow. On one side of the pier, behind a tall metal gate, was a jetty that housed two public saunas, one for men and one for women. To the right of the jetty were the saunas themselves, and to the left was a square of sea enclosed between three platforms. Half of this square was covered by ice, like the rest of the harbour (the Baltic’s low salinity means that it freezes more easily than most seas). But a patch beside the boardwalk was kept clear by a strong pump bubbling from below. Those few metres of ice-free water were the swimming pool.

  I have swum in the sea in Shetland on many occasions, though mostly when I was young and stupid. That was cold. It was always cold, even on the warmest day. The Gulf Stream may keep the North Atlantic milder than it might otherwise be, but knee-deep in the waves, goose-pimpled and shivering, you would be hard-pressed to notice. But the difference between that cold and the cold of Ekenäs harbour was probably several degrees. And though I’d come to experience the sauna for myself, the idea of plunging into that ice-edged water, either before or after the heat, did not fill me with excitement. It was an experience that could surely be pleasurable only in hindsight: as something I had done, not as something I was about to do. And certainly not something I was in the process of doing.

  The swimming, I’d been told, was optional, which was a relief. But beyond that, I really didn’t know what I was supposed to do. There must be rules and protocols for a sauna, I thought. There are always rules and protocols for such culturally significant activities. I had assumed there would be other people whose lead I could follow, to avoid any serious lapses in social etiquette. But the only other guest was just leaving the changing room as I arrived, and so I was on my own. I’d read somewhere that most saunas do not permit the wearing of trunks, and so I’d not brought any. In fact, trunks had been pretty low on my list of things to pack for Finland in January, so I had none to wear even if I’d wanted to. Public nakedness is not something I have engaged in often, but in this case I was willing to do as is done, and so I stripped, opened the door to the shower room, and then went in to the sauna.

  The room itself was just two metres deep and about the same wide, with wood panelling all over, and three slatted steps rising up from the entranceway. There were two windows on one side, and a metal heater was in the corner beside the door. On the top step, where I gingerly sat down, was a pail with an inch or two of water and a wooden ladle inside. I scooped a spoonful out and flung it onto the hot rocks. The stove screamed in protest. The temperature rose quickly in response, and steam curdled the air. An unfamiliar smell, sweet and tangy, filled the room: the smell of hot wood oils.

  I sat back against the wall and looked out of the windows at the ice-covered sea. I was sweating from every pore, and my breath felt laboured on accou
nt of the steam. It was relaxing, but not entirely. One could rest, but not sleep. Again I wished for guidance: how long was I supposed to stay in the sauna? Was there something else I ought to be doing, other than just sitting? Was now the moment I should be throwing myself into the sea? I could hear people next door, in the women’s sauna – there was laughter, and even the occasional shriek – but I could hardly pop in to ask for their advice. So instead I compromised and took a cold shower. It seemed suitable and not too cowardly an option. Open-mouthed and shaking hard, I stood beneath the flow of water for a moment that felt like an hour, my whole body trying to resist the ache of it. Then I rushed back into the sauna again, sweat bristling on my wet skin.

  This ritual of intense heat and intense cold is considered a bringer of health, good for both mind and body. It has been part of the culture of this region for over a thousand years, and its importance is perhaps reflected in the fact that sauna is the only Finnish word to have found its way into common English usage. Today most Finns have one in their home, and many enjoy them at their workplace too. People socialise here; they have business meetings; and sometimes they just come to sit alone.

  A sauna is an ideal place in which to be omissa oloissaan, or undisturbed in one’s thoughts. Quiet contemplation is something of a national pastime here, instilled from childhood. ‘One has to discover everything for oneself,’ says Too-ticky, in Tove Jansson’s Moominland Midwinter, ‘and get over it all alone.’ Silence and introspection are not just socially acceptable in Finland, they are considered positive and healthy. They are traits often misinterpreted by those from more talkative cultures as shyness or even bad manners.