Day of Kalevala - Day of Finnish Culture

Today, 28 of February is the day of Finnish culture. It is celebrated every year and it is also an official flagging day (we seem to have quite many of them in this country). At schools pupils may be doing some special things that are about Finnish culture, and many societies, for example, organise concerts, lectures etc.I must confess right away that we forgot to pull up the flag this morning, but maybe this post will compensate a little to that.

Day of Kalevala has its origins in the Finnish national epic Kalevala, that was compiled by Elias Lönnrot in 1835. It is a collection of poems Lönnrot collected in Karelia, East-Finland during his travels among peasants and common people. The published book had a huge impact on the patriotic feelings of Finns, then being a part of Russia. Many artists were struck by the poems and went to Karelia to search for inspiration and the "unspoilt mood".

One of the painters, who was strongly affected by Kalevala, was Akseli Gallen-Kallela.He took a very ambitious task and illustrated our national epic. Many of his paintings can be seen for example in the National Museum or Ateneum in Helsinki.Here is one example of his paintings for Kalevala. It is called "The defence of Sampo" (Picture is from the wikipedia site above telling about Akseli Gallen-Kallela)


















Other pictures I like to show to you today are my photos of a cookie / candy tin I bought from a thrift store a few months ago. I was looking for old buttons and this tin was full of them. Suddenly I realised there was a picture of dancers in Finnish national costumes on the lid. As I work with the national costume fabrics and find them very fascinating, I thought it would be great to have that tin, too, and I asked if it was for sale. For sure it was, said
the girl, and so I came happily home with lots of buttons AND a cute national costume tin.

Left is a picture of the dancers on the cover. It is probably about midsummer celebration and people are dancing in the traditional costumes. On the side there is a serene panorama of a landscape from North-Finland, depicting a late evening or night, when it does not get dark at all. This tin just oozes Finnish summer sentimentality from the times already gone. At the same time it is also very naive, even humorous. I guess I found the combination very appealing.



The costumes on the tin are real, existing national costumes. For example the girl on the left with a black waistcoat, green apron and reddish skirt is wearing a costume from South-Ostrobothnia (West-Finland). The girl with a blueish striped dress and a white apron is wearing a costume from Munsala, a Swedish speaking area in West-Finland.




On the side of the tin you can see a landscape with diverse wooden buildings. In this red house peasants were living. The fence is a typical, much used type all over the country, and still nowadays very suitable for many purposes.






You may wonder what that curious little house on a column means. It is a typical storage room used in northern Finland.
It was built on a tree trunk in order to prevent bears, wolves, lynxes and smaller animals to plunder food. When peasants went to fetch supplies there, they used a ladder to climb up. In Seurasaari open air museum in Helsinki there is an example of this kind of storage building.



Even the church and the bell tower are situated next to a lake. It is commonly said that an everlasting Finnish dream is to live middle in a town, next to a
lake and in a free standing house...