THIRTEENTH LETTER
Relates to Åbo, the ancient capital of Finland; tells of its famous castle and the picture of the scene once enacted there; its market place; its hospitable people; its fine old Cathedral; the tombs of the heroes of the Thirty Years’ War and of Queen Katherine, the peasant queen of Sweden.
Åbo, Finland, July 10.
My dear Judicia,
Finland has four important commercial ports—Åbo, Hangö, Helsingfors, and Viborg. The two former are available in winter, for though not ice free, as the experience I related in the last chapter proves, the icebreakers can usually plow their way through and reach their berths in the course of time. Helsingfors and Viborg, however, are usually impossible in the winter time.
I was not sorry that my engagements led me first to Åbo, for historically it is the most interesting town in Finland. It is true that it is robbed of its ancient glory as the capital of the country and the seat of its great university, for both the capital and the university have been removed within the last hundred years to the more eligible site of Helsingfors. But Åbo has lost little time in crying over spilt milk or bewailing its ancient glories. Especially of late she has been making the most of her fine situation, as the city nearest to its neighbor, Sweden, and has greatly developed its commercial possibilities.
The port is a mile or more away from the heart of the city, with which it is connected by a line of electric cars. Almost the first thing that I saw on landing was a huge building covered with gray plaster. I found it difficult to decide whether it was a warehouse, a factory, or a prison. I was wrong in all my guesses, for it was Åbo’s famous castle, one of the great historic landmarks of Finland, and now converted into a museum, where one can study the costumes, the ancient armor, the furniture, and the articles of home life of this hardy, vigorous race.
The scene of one of the most interesting pictures that I ever saw is laid in this old castle. It is by Edelfelt, and now hangs in the national gallery at Helsingfors.
In a room of state in the old fortress lies an open coffin, in which is seen the face of a stern warrior with a long, flowing beard. Another soldier is standing by, with wrath upon his features, and, violating the sanctity of death, he pulls violently at the dead man’s beard. A lady of noble mien is standing near, resentment and haughty indignation depicted on her queenly face.
The great picture, perhaps the most famous and dramatic one ever painted by a Finnish artist, tells its own story, and when we know a little of Finnish history we can easily interpret it. The old man in the coffin is Klas Fleming, the commander of the castle; the soldier standing by and pulling the dead man’s beard is Duke Carl of Sweden, afterwards King Charles IX, who was striving to gain the throne and whom the Finns had vigorously opposed in favor of Sigismund their king. The duke could not capture the castle while the old commander was alive, but when he was killed it soon capitulated.
Angry at the long resistance, Duke Carl could only vent his wrath by showing an indignity to the dead. Turning to the commandant’s wife, who was standing by, he said, “If your husband were living his head would not be as safe as it is now.” But the countess, undaunted, replied, while her eyes flashed fire, “If he were living, your highness would not be here.”
There are two more very interesting centers in Åbo of which I must tell you. One is the market place, and the other the ancient cathedral. In the market place one can learn what people are to-day; in the cathedral one can learn from the monuments and the inscriptions something of what they were seven hundred years ago.
These open markets in the central square of most European cities are a great institution, and if Americans really want to reduce the cost of living, about which we all talk so much and so vehemently, they cannot do better than to establish such a country market in every considerable town throughout the Union.
To the market place in the center of Åbo come the farmers and their wives from all the surrounding country, some with large loads and some with little loads, but all ready to sell to any customer an infinitesimal quantity of their produce for an infinitesimal price. You can buy a single egg, or one carrot, or three or four potatoes, or a pat of butter that would not weigh an eighth of a pound, and you pay only what a single carrot is worth, or the price of an eighth of a pound of butter.
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
Interior of a Finnish Cottage.
The lady of the house, even if she be a lady of high degree, does not consider it beneath her dignity to go to market herself, though she may often send her maid, or take her along to carry the market basket. In this sort of marketing you do not have to pay two or three middlemen’s profits, nor do you have to pay your grocer or butcher for the salary of several high-priced attendants and for an automobile, or a two-horse team to deliver the goods.
The most curious thing I saw in the Åbo market was the bread, which was being peddled by many an old woman from the back of her cart. The cheaper kinds are made of rye meal, and are as hard as the nether millstone. The loaves are flat and about the size of a dinner plate, with a large round hole in the middle. They would make admirable quoits, which you know is my favorite game, and if my Finnish friends would not have considered it altogether too frivolous I should have bought some of these loaves and inaugurated a quoit tournament on the spot.
In some places the bread is baked only once in six months, and the older the bread the harder to masticate.
Some edibles are “not as nahsty as they look,” as our English friends say of certain of our American dishes, but to the uninitiated this Finnish black bread is quite as nasty as it looks, for it is sour as well as hard, and in the back districts, when harvests are poor, chopped straw and bark are mixed with the meal.
I would not have you imagine, however, for a moment, that in the well-to-do families, or in the comfortable hotels and restaurants, we are reduced to such fare as this. In fact, I know of no country in the world, unless it be Sweden, where food is so abundant, so varied, and so deliciously cooked.
As I wandered in and out among the stalls of meat and vegetables and bread and cheese, woolen stockings and aprons, and butter and sausages, where one could find almost anything he might want to eat or drink or wear, I was most interested in the faces of these rugged, weather-beaten peasants.
Ernest Young has well described the character of the Finnish people when he says: “Nature, fate, and tradition have stamped a common mark on the Finnish type of character, which, indeed, varies considerably in the country, but is easily recognized by the foreigner. The general traits of character are hardened, patient, passive strength; resignation; perseverance, allied to a certain obstinacy; a slow, contemplative way of thinking; an unwillingness to become angry and a tendency, when anger has been aroused, to indulge in unmeasured wrath; coolness in deadly peril, but caution afterwards; … adherence to the old and well known; attention to duty; a law-abiding habit of mind; love of liberty, hospitality, honesty; a predilection for religious meditation, revealing itself in true piety, which, however, is apt to have too much respect for the mere letter.”
My own briefer acquaintance with the Finns has confirmed Mr. Young’s study of their traits of character, and I could imagine that even in the market place, as I walked back and forth, I could discover in the faces many of these admirable traits.
When one meets the upper, I will not say better classes, one is sure to be charmed with his Finnish friends. Their abundant hospitality, which always presses upon us two cups of coffee (delicious coffee at that) when you really only want one; their deferential courtesy, shown not only in words, but in a multitude of kind and thoughtful actions; their intelligence; their intimate knowledge of the great world outside their own boundaries; their pleasing vivacity (for in this respect they differ from the quiet stolidness of the less educated peasantry) all these qualities combine to make them the most charming of hosts and companions.
The cathedral of Åbo stands not far from the market place, across the little river that runs through the town, and on a sightly eminence of its own. It was begun in 1229, and was not finished until the year 1400. How patient these old builders were! They did not run up their jerry-built houses and churches in a month, but when they were built they stood for centuries.
This cathedral is of purely Gothic architecture, much like the cathedral in Upsala, and it dates from about the same period. It has not been renovated out of all resemblance to its original self, however, like the Upsala dome, and on that account is more interesting, in my opinion. The lofty brick walls are scarred by the storms of the centuries and eaten out here and there by the tooth of time, but the church is well preserved in spite of its nearly seven hundred years, and is filled, Sunday after Sunday, with a throng of honest worshipers.
The mural paintings about the altar, though of modern date, are well worth studying, one of them, especially, which represents the first baptism in Finland at a spot very near to Åbo by Bishop Henrik, an English missionary, who in 1157 undertook the perilous task of converting the heathen Finns. The good bishop died in Finland, and was buried in this old church, where his bones rested in peace until 1720, when the Russians, for some unexplained reason, dug them up and carried them off. No man in these days knows his sepulchre. In some of the side chapels are buried heroes of the Thirty Years’ War, famous generals—whose suits of armor, scarred and dented by the enemy’s bullets, still stand beside their tombs.
The most famous tomb of all in the old Dom Church is that of Queen Katherine of Sweden, wife of Eric XIV, the oldest son of Gustavus Vasa. Eric had a checkered career, both politically and matrimonially. He was finally deposed from the throne, but while he occupied it his hand had been refused by Queen Elizabeth, by Mary Queen of Scots, and by two German princesses. He seems to have been very cosmopolitan in his love affairs, wooing Protestant and Catholic, Anglo-Saxon and Teuton with equal avidity. At length, having apparently no luck in court circles, he turned to a beautiful girl among his own people, and married a peasant’s daughter named Karin (or Katherine) Månsdotter. The following is the story which one often hears in Finland:
“One day King Eric was strolling through the market place at Stockholm, when his attention was attracted by a singularly fair and graceful child, the daughter of a common soldier, who was selling nuts. He sent her to his palace to be educated, and when she was old enough he asked her to marry him. All kinds of objections were raised by his nobles and his relatives, and accusations of witchcraft were made against Karin, but the wild and passionate monarch took his way and married the little nut-seller. Then a brother prince, who felt deeply the disgrace that had been brought upon the royal order by this unseemly match, sent Eric a present of a handsome cloak in the back of which was sewed a patch of rough, homespun cloth. Eric accepted the gift, had the patch of homespun embroidered with gold and studded with jewels until it was the most brilliant and valuable part of the garment, and then returned it to the donor.”[5]
The peasant queen well repaid his love and devotion. She was buried in Åbo Cathedral, where her great black marble sarcophagus reminds every visitor of the little nut-seller who became a queen and who showed her queenly qualities in adversity and exile. A stained-glass window in the cathedral shows her dressed in white robes, with a crown upon her head, stepping down from her throne on the arm of a Finnish page.
The country round about Åbo is, for Finland, fertile and productive, and in this region is made much of the delicious butter that is sent to England, and often much farther afield, but which on its way through Denmark often gets labeled “Danish butter.”
It is interesting for those who butter their bread with the Finnish product to know that in the many steam creameries “the dairymaids in spotless white linen dresses and aprons receive, weigh, and sterilize the milk before it is made into butter, while all the churning, scalding, and butter-packing rooms are models of cleanliness.” It is always a wonder to me why countries that make such delicious butter seem to be so fond of margarine, for everywhere on the railway stations, in the tramcars and in the newspapers in Scandinavia one sees “Pellerin’s Margarine” advertised. But there are some questions which polite travelers must not be too inquisitive about, and this is one of them.
Butter would naturally lead us to cows (unless the suspicions excited by these advertisements turn us aside), and cows lead into the country, but I have not room in this letter to tell you of country life in Finland, a fascinating theme, which must be reserved for another letter.
Faithfully yours,
Phillips.