50 Fun Facts About Helsinki

Helsinki-born artist Tove Jansson created which family of storybook characters?

The Moomins began in 1945 with a small book about a great flood. A British newspaper group later asked Jansson for a Moomin comic strip, and it ran in a London evening paper from the 1950s.

By what Swedish name was Helsinki known in English until about 1930?

Helsingfors is still the city's Swedish name. The 'fors' means rapids: the first town of 1550 stood beside river rapids about five kilometres north of today's centre.

On which sea inlet does Helsinki sit?

Gulf of Finland ice used to shut the harbour for months each winter. Icebreakers, many of them built in the city's own shipyard, now keep the lanes open all year, and Helsinki is the country's leading seaport.

The 1975 Helsinki Accords were signed by 33 European states, the United States and which other country?

Canada and the United States signed alongside almost every country in Europe. The text's human-rights pledges outlasted the summit: activists in Moscow and across eastern Europe formed 'Helsinki groups' to hold their governments to them.

Which king founded Helsinki in 1550?

Gustav I of Sweden, better known as Gustav Vasa, wanted a trading port to rival the Hanseatic merchants across the gulf. To fill it he simply ordered the burghers of four other Finnish towns to move there.

Which design house, founded in Helsinki in 1951, did Jacqueline Kennedy make famous in America?

Marimekko found its American public in 1960, when the wife of a presidential candidate bought a batch of its bold cotton dresses. The press took notice, and a young Helsinki firm became a fashion name.

Why was Helsinki moved a few kilometres south to its present site in 1640?

For a deeper harbour: the first town sat on a bay too shallow for ships, and its settlers had been allowed to drift away. Count Per Brahe led the move down to the open sea.

What killed most of Helsinki's population in 1710?

Plague was only the first blow. Three years later, during the Great Northern War, Russian troops took what was left of the town and it burned.

Which Russian emperor made Helsinki the capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812?

Alexander I had taken Finland from Sweden only three years earlier. He wanted its capital further from Swedish influence and closer to his own, so a small harbour town was promoted.

Which city was Finland's capital before Helsinki?

Turku lost more than its title. After a great fire destroyed most of the old capital in 1827, its university, then the only one in the country, followed the government to Helsinki.

Carl Ludvig Engel rebuilt Helsinki's centre after 1812 in a neoclassical style meant to resemble which city?

St Petersburg was the model for the new capital of Russia's Grand Duchy. Engel, born in Berlin, had worked there himself before he came north to lay out the new city centre.

Which "of the North" nickname is Helsinki often given?

The White City of the North is put down by some to the pale neoclassical centre built in the 1800s, and by others to the light-coloured local granite used in many of its buildings.

Which Helsinki-born confectioner opened a café in 1891 that grew into one of the Nordic countries' biggest food companies?

Karl Fazer opened it at Kluuvikatu 3, where a Fazer café still trades. He was also a marksman who shot for Finland at the 1912 Olympics.

Which architect designed Helsinki Central Station, a masterpiece of Finnish Art Nouveau?

Eliel Saarinen drew it in 1904. In 1922 his second-prize design for Chicago's Tribune Tower made his name in America, and a year later he moved there for good.

Which Finnish running legend lit the cauldron in the stadium when Helsinki hosted the 1952 Olympics?

Paavo Nurmi had won nine Olympic golds in the 1920s. When his name was announced, athletes broke ranks to get a look at him, and the flame was then relayed up the stadium tower.

Helsinki has Finland's only example of which transport, opened in 1982?

A metro: it opened in August 1982 after 27 years of planning, as fast growth in the city's suburbs overloaded its transport. The line has since pushed west into neighbouring Espoo.

About how many islands lie within the city of Helsinki?

About 300: the figure usually given is 315. One is home to the city's zoo, and another, long a closed military zone, opened to day-trippers only in 2016.

Profits from Helsinki's Linnanmäki amusement park, opened in 1950, go to which cause?

Child welfare: six children's charities set the park up to raise money for their work, and the non-profit foundation they formed still owns it and hands over the takings.

Which hit mobile game was created by Supercell, a games studio based in Helsinki?

Clash of Clans made its makers rich fast: the year after its 2012 release, two Japanese firms paid $1.5 billion for 51% of Supercell, a three-year-old studio with just two games on the market.

Which country sent a team to the Olympics for the first time at Helsinki in 1952?

The Soviet Union arrived at the height of the Cold War and housed its athletes in a separate Eastern-bloc village. Its first plan had been to fly them in from Leningrad each day.

Helsinki's National Romantic buildings of the early 1900s took their imagery from which Finnish classic?

The Kalevala was a common theme of the whole era, in stone as much as in paint and music. In 1921 an architect even proposed a 'Kalevala House' tower for the city, but it was never built.

What global distinction does greater Helsinki hold?

Northernmost city of over one million people, yet its winters are milder than the latitude suggests, thanks to the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic Current.

Helsinki's Tuska festival, first held in 1998, is devoted to which kind of music?

Heavy metal, and the name is a statement of intent: 'tuska' is Finnish for pain or agony. The festival moved in 2011 from a city-centre park to a site in the Sörnäinen district.

Which Cold War thriller set in Moscow was actually filmed on the streets of Helsinki?

Gorky Park was refused permission to film in Moscow, so Helsinki played the part, with a city park standing in for the one in the title. The same streets had doubled for Russia in Warren Beatty's Reds two years earlier.

Which architect designed Finlandia Hall and the Stora Enso headquarters?

Alvar Aalto insisted on white Italian marble as a link to the Mediterranean. It could not take the Finnish climate: slabs were being replaced by the 1990s, and the whole facade had to be rebuilt in the 2020s.

Which sea fortress off Helsinki became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991?

Suomenlinna has served three masters. Built by Sweden, it went on to defend Russia and then Finland, whose name it took in 1918, and around 800 people still live inside its walls.

The Swedish island fortress of Sveaborg, begun off Helsinki in 1748, was nicknamed which stronghold 'of the North'?

Gibraltar it was not. In 1808 the supposedly impregnable fortress that Admiral Augustin Ehrensvärd had spent his life building surrendered to the Russians after two months, and Sweden lost Finland the next year.

Which president of Finland has an equestrian statue in central Helsinki?

C. G. E. Mannerheim belongs on a horse: before he led Finland's armies he spent almost thirty years as a cavalry officer in the Russian imperial army. He is the only person ever named Marshal of Finland.

How was Temppeliaukio Church, opened in 1969, built?

Excavated directly into solid rock, it keeps its rough granite walls bare beneath a copper-lined dome. The rock gives such fine acoustics that the church is a popular concert venue.

Helsinki's Sibelius Monument is a welded cluster of steel what?

Pipes, which the press at once nicknamed 'organ pipes'. Sculptor Eila Hiltunen insisted she had never had an organ in mind, and critics of her abstract design forced her to add a portrait of the composer.

What do the four giant granite men flanking the entrance of Helsinki Central Station hold in their hands?

Spherical lamps, lit at night: the figures are Emil Wikström's Lantern Bearers of 1914. Finland's state railway has since turned the stern stone men into cartoon mascots for its adverts.

On May Day eve, Helsinki's Havis Amanda statue is crowned with what?

A student cap is placed by university students at six in the evening of 30 April, in a ceremony known as the capping of Manta. The bronze mermaid, modelled in Paris, has stood by the Market Square since 1908.

Which title did Helsinki hold in 2012?

World Design Capital was no mere badge: under the theme of 'embedded design', two thirds of the city's residents took part in the year's events, by its organisers' count. UNESCO followed in 2014 by naming Helsinki a City of Design.

Helsinki hosted the first-ever edition of which championship in 1983?

World Athletics Championships had an edge in 1983 that no Olympics of the time could match: with boycotts emptying Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984, Helsinki was where East and West actually raced each other.

Whose 2006 victory brought the Eurovision Song Contest to Helsinki in 2007?

Lordi, a band that performs in monster masks, won with 'Hard Rock Hallelujah', the first hard-rock band ever to take the contest. It was also the first win by any Finnish group, so Helsinki got to host for the first time.

Which port did Helsinki overtake in 2017 to become the world's busiest passenger port?

Dover lost the title by a whisker: Finland's news agency counted 11.8 million ferry passengers at Helsinki in 2017 against 11.7 million at the English port, where traffic was down from about 14 million a decade earlier.

What moved Helsinki's first trams in 1891?

Horses pulled the first cars, but only for nine years: electricity arrived in 1900, and the trams have run ever since.

To which capital has a rail tunnel from Helsinki been proposed?

Tallinn is only about 80 km away across the gulf, a two-hour ferry ride. A tunnel that long would be the longest rail tunnel in the world, well ahead of Switzerland's 57 km Gotthard Base Tunnel.

In which neighbouring city is Helsinki Airport located?

Vantaa got the airport because of the Olympics: the old airfield inside the city could not cope, so a new one was laid out to the north and opened in July 1952, just in time for the Games.

Which Helsinki club, founded in 1907, is Finland's most successful football team?

HJK did what no other Finnish club has managed: in 1998 it knocked out the French side Metz to reach the group stage of the Champions League.

Which fish gives its name to the market held on Helsinki's Market Square since 1743?

Baltic herring has been sold on the quay each October since 1743. That makes the market older than any building still standing in the city centre, where the oldest house dates from 1757.

Löyly, a wooden landmark that opened on Helsinki's southern shore in 2016, is a public what?

Sauna: 'löyly' is the Finnish word for the steam that rises when water hits the hot stove. Bathers here step out of a smoke sauna and straight into the sea, at any time of year.

Which runner won the 5,000 metres, the 10,000 metres and the marathon at Helsinki's 1952 Olympics?

Emil Zátopek had never run a marathon in his life. He entered Helsinki's anyway, having already won both track races, and took a third gold with a third Olympic record.

Which Helsinki-born computer science student released the first version of a free operating system in 1991?

Linus Torvalds disliked the system that came with his first PC, so he wrote his own, Linux, and gave it away as a free download. Its descendants now run everything from supercomputers to Android phones.

Helsinki's red-brick Uspenski Cathedral, completed in 1868, belongs to which Christian tradition?

Orthodox: its gold cupolas are the plainest reminder of the century when Finland belonged to the Russian Empire. The city's tourist office calls it the largest Orthodox church in Western Europe.

Which of Carl Ludvig Engel's four buildings on Senate Square has become the symbol of Helsinki?

The Cathedral crowns the square, with the twelve apostles lined up along its roof. Engel never saw it finished: he died in 1840, and it was completed twelve years later.

Which American architect designed the Kiasma modern art museum building?

Steven Holl beat more than 500 other entries in 1993 with a design he called Chiasma, a crossing point. The competition title stuck, and in its Finnish spelling it became the museum's name.

The 1940 Summer Olympics were handed to Helsinki after which city gave them up?

Tokyo forfeited the Games in 1938 because of Japan's war in China. Helsinki finished a stadium for them, the Second World War cancelled them altogether, and the stadium waited until 1952 for its Olympics.

Helsinki's Kamppi Chapel, a small wooden building beside a busy shopping centre, was built to offer what?

A moment of silence is all it promises: the chapel holds no regular services and welcomes people of any faith or none. It stands in what the city calls perhaps the busiest spot in Finland.

Which 1891 Gothic Revival building is Finland's largest stone place of worship?

St. John's Church was built on the hill where the townsfolk used to light their midsummer bonfires. Its twin spires rise 74 metres, and its excellent acoustics have made it a favourite concert venue.