Daughter of the Baltic, December 2023…..

Leica M6, 50mm Canon LTM F1.4

I arrived in Helsinki on a February afternoon at what I took to be dusk and was informed, with the flat cheerfulness Finns reserve for delivering bad news, that it was in fact one-fifteen. This is a city that spends a third of the year in a sort of permanent blue twilight, which explains a great deal about the national character. Finns do not so much converse as exchange the minimum viable quantity of information and then stand companionably in silence, and after three days I found this so restful that I began to resent people back home who insist on asking how you are. The city itself sits on a granite lump at the top of the world, surrounded by some three hundred islands, and gives the general impression of having been designed by someone extremely competent who was nonetheless in a hurry to get indoors.

The centre can be walked in a morning, which is fortunate, because standing still in Helsinki in winter is medically inadvisable. Start at Senate Square, where Carl Ludvig Engel’s Lutheran cathedral rises up white and green and faintly smug, like a wedding cake that has heard something unflattering about the other cakes. Down the hill and across the water is the Uspenski Cathedral, red-bricked and onion-domed and gloriously out of place, a reminder that Finland spent a century as a Russian grand duchy and has been quietly changing the subject ever since. Then head for the railway station, where four enormous stone men hold glowing globes and glare at commuters with an expression I can only describe as disappointed, and finish along the Esplanadi, a boulevard of design shops selling chairs that cost more than my car and are, infuriatingly, better made.

Now, the food. Helsinki’s market square offers smoked salmon, reindeer, and small fried fish eaten whole in a manner that assumes a level of dental confidence I no longer possess, and it is all very good indeed. What is not very good — and I say this having been assured otherwise by a woman at a kiosk who watched my face with obvious anticipation — is salmiakki, a salted liquorice confection that tastes like being scolded by the sea. The Finns drink more coffee per head than anyone else on earth, roughly twelve kilograms a year each, which is not a beverage habit but a lifestyle. They also have more saunas than cars, and if you visit a public one at Löyly or Kotiharju you will be required to sit at 90°C among strangers and then plunge into the Baltic, an experience that removes both your dignity and, briefly, your ability to form vowels.