High Season for Helsinki

The Ateljee Bar, intimate and stylish, frequented by Finns drinking espresso and whispering into Nokia cell phones, is one of my favorite places in this city. Located on the 14th floor of the Hotel Torni, it has terraces on two sides that yield bird’s-eye views of this low-rise city set on a small peninsula in the Gulf of Finland, with 300 islets scattered around it like constellations in the steel-blue sea.

I first visited here in winter, when the gulf was crusted with ice and the streets were silent, giving the city the air of a sanatorium. But when I returned in May, there were noisy schoolchildren in the streets, grape hyacinths blooming around the statue of Czar Alexander II in Senate Square, and people dancing the cha-cha to a Latin band set up near the harbor. From the bar’s terrace I could see sailboats ans greening birch trees. After a long winter, the Finnish capital was humming back to life.

If everything has its season, Helsinki’s is surely near. Locked in cold and dark for eight months, hit by a bitter recession in the early ‘90s that pushed unemployment to 20%, and traditionally at Europe’s margin, it now has reason to raise its head and smile. The economy has rebounded sharply, led by companies like the Masa-Yards, the cruise ship builders, and Nokia, the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones (there are 5.2 million people in Finland and 3.1 million mobile phones).

What they may be calling each other about is the coming year, which will be a big one for the city, marking the 450th anniversary of its founding by King Gustav Vasa of Sweden. Next month, Finland assumes the presidency of the European Union, which the Finns strongly supported joining in 1995. And in 2000, Helsinki will take its place as one of nine European Cities of Culture.

It is pulling out all the stops for its cultural coming out, re-landscaping, renovating, scheduling 400 special events and erecting new architectural showplaces like the glass-lined headquarters of the city’s major newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. A replica of an 11th century Viking ship will drop anchor in the port; a cathedral made of ice will be sculpted in Senate Square; a major exhibition of the work of Finnish painter Magnus Enkell will go on display at the Helsinki City Art Museum; Placido Domingo will sing at the stadium built for the Olympic Games of 1952; and every month a different private sauna will open to the public. At long last, this European bridesmaid will be one of the brides.

Having been there briefly once before, I didn’t need any of these reasons to return. I already knew how poised and lovely Helsinki is, and wanted to get to know it better in the lushness of a Finnish spring. Then, too, I wondered how the flowers and fair weather would affect the Finns, whom I found to be a punctiliously polite but rather undemonstrative people. It was raining when I arrived at the handsome Helsinki airport, about a 30-minute drive north of the city, and, seemingly true to form, my Finnish seatmate told me to look at the weather.

“It’s awful,” I replied.

“Welcome to Finland,” he said stonily.

But during the week I spent in Helsinki the weather got better, with blue skies, shirt-sleeve temperatures and long days, meaning I could ramble around in daylight until 10 p.m. Safe, compact and walkable, Helsinki is an easy town to enjoy, ribboned with parks and inlets of the ocean licking deep into its heart. Stores like Artek and Marimekko along the Esplanadi, Helsinki’s central park, showcase the cunning of Finnish design, and most of the city’s main cultural institutions are housed in show-stopping buildings, from Finlandia Hall, home of the Helsinki Philharmonic (designed in 1971 by Alvar Aalto), to the new opera house and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened last year. Still, moviegoing has become the national pastime, particularly among the young, who prefer films made in Finland to American or European imports from France or Hollywood.

Above all, though, Helsinki is an architecture lover’s town, not old by European standards or quaint in the way of Tallinn, its Estonian neighbor across the Baltic. Indeed, Helsinki didn’t really start to take shape until Sweden ceded the country to Russia in 1809 and Czar Alexander I proclaimed the city capital of the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland.

To make it worthy, the czar chose Carl Ludvig Engel, a German architect who had mastered the Neoclassical style while working in St. Petersburg. In the next 25 years, Engel gave Helsinki a Neoclassical face, filling it with 30 edifices clustered especially around stunning Senate Square. There, his cornflower yellow Council of State and university buildings flank a broad piazza on the east and west, with a row of dignified shops to the south and, to the north, a tremendously steep set of steps leading to the green-domed Lutheran Cathedral.

Today, Senate Square is at the top of any sightseer’s list, an intense and thrilling Neoclassical jolt. During my rambles, I ended up there at least once a day, catching a tram, peeking into the University of Helsinki Library to see the exuberant murals on its dome, sipping tea at the Cafe Engel on Aleksanterinkatu (with the architect’s renderings on the wall) and plodding up the steps of the cathedral, where gulls soar and your high vantage point makes it seem as if the massive Baltic Sea ferries in the harbor are sitting on the rooftops of the houses to the south. One afternoon I attended a free concert in the sparely decorated cathedral; 86% of Finland’s population is Lutheran, which may be why every boom of the immense organ made me think of Martin Luther hammering his rebellious treatise on the Wittenberg church door.

If Senate Square were all there was to Helsinki, that would be enough. But the ethnically homogeneous Finns (almost 20% of whom live in Helsinki) have a real flair for architecture and design. Time and again I was struck by their similarity to the Japanese in their reverence for materials, simplicity and function. The Finns, too, are great copiers. So when the Beaux Arts architectural style supplanted Neoclassicism, they lined pretty Esplanadi Park with elegant buildings worthy of the Champs-Elysees. And at the turn of the century, when the rest of Europe embraced Art Nouveau, the Finns followed suit, but did so in a singularly Finnish way.

Embodying a style known as National Romanticism, it uses traditional Finnish materials like wood and granite, and elaborate motifs, like the gargoyles, turrets and towers drawn from Finnish folklore and the national epic poem, the Kalevala. For this reason, large sections of central Helsinki, like the beautiful Eira district, are Art Nouveau treasures, with fairy-tale buildings where you’d expect to see Rapunzel letting down her golden hair.

The rest of Europe started paying attention to what was going on in Finland at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, where the Finns built a pavilion designed by, among others, Eliel Saarinen, father of renowned architect Eero. Its interiors were designed by painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, a friend of the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, both lifelong National Romantic flag bearers. Gallen-Kallela’s dark, mystical paintings can be seen at the Helsinki Ateneum, and his eccentric, slant-eaved house west of downtown is now a museum with a pleasant cafe. Saarinen evolved, melding National Romanticism with Art Deco to create Helsinki’s main railway station, a local landmark, in brawny granite. It became an early 20th century paean to the future, not unlike New York’s Rockefeller Center.

And the architectural story goes on. Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium, just north of an ocean inlet called Toolonlahti, is considered a Functionalist standout, its clean lines and stark modernism inspired by Germany’s Bauhaus architects. Helsinki was chosen to host the 1940 Olympics, but World War II intervened as Finland allied itself with Germany.

Helsinki eventually did hold the Olympics in 1952, with their star runner, Paavo Nurmi (the “Flying Finn”), carrying the torch into the stadium. There’s a fine sports museum at Olympic Stadium now, a tower that affords sterling views of the city and a little architectural lesson for those of us who attended American public schools built in the ‘50s and ‘60s, many of them inspired by Functionalism. I always thought the style sterile until I saw the mold, Helsinki’s clean, white, soaring Olympic Stadium, which looks as modern today as it must have in the ‘50s.

In the stadium’s Olympic pool, I swam laps between stints in the sauna. As the Finns hurry into a brighter future, I hope they don’t leave their saunas behind. They have been an integral part of Finnish life at least since the 15th century, the place where Finns socialize and rejuvenate while getting clean. In days gone by, they have done a good deal more within sauna chambers, including brewing beer, preparing brides and giving birth. Former president Urho Kaleva Kekkonen routinely held cabinet meetings in a sauna. When Finnish troops joined U.N. peacekeeping forces in the Sinai, they got right to work building 35 sauna huts in the desert. There were saunas in all three of the hotels I stayed in while visiting Helsinki (the Inter-Continental, across from the opera; the Hotel Torni, an Art Deco gem in the center of town; and the modestly priced Hotel Anna, near the Eira district). Both of the ones I tried, in the Inter-Continental and the Torni, were immaculately clean and relaxing--but empty.

It wasn’t until I made the trip by bus to the Finnish Sauna Society, on Lauttasaari Island just west of downtown, that I took a sauna with other people (all women; Finnish saunas are generally sex-segregated). The society, housed in a modest building in a forest by the seashore, is for members only, most of whom are men. But several times a week women may use them, and foreign visitors are welcome for a fee (about $10). There are two traditional saunas, heated by wood fires, and two heated electrically. Temperatures top 200 degrees. I tried them all, bought a switch made of aromatic birch leaves known as a vihta (which supposedly improves the circulation when beat against the back and limbs) and had an attendant scrub me down.

During all this, no one spoke a word to me. Eventually I got up the courage to tiptoe, naked, down the pier and take a dip in the frigid sea. It was the best part of the whole ritual, leaving me feeling peaceful, glowing and perfectly content to sit on a bench in the nude, thinking about nothing and watching other bathers dunk themselves in the Baltic. As one elderly woman passed, she paused and said, “Good, isn’t it?” with the barest hint of a smile.

I tried hard to be engaging, but that was about as much as I got out of the notoriously taciturn Finns. Granted, I don’t speak Finnish, an extremely difficult language thought to have been brought to the Baltic centuries ago by immigrants from Russia’s Ural Mountains. Apart from language (actually, most young Finns speak English), cold winters and periodic economic travails, the people have historical reasons for being standoffish, given their long domination by imperialist powers and their precarious position between the Soviet Union and free Europe during the Cold War. (Even now the Finns have opted not to join NATO, partly out of concern over how it would be viewed in Russia.)

One thing I did learn about Finns is that they love coffee. Contrary to the prevailing notion that Finns tend to be drunkards, based on what I observed during my stay caffeine seems to be their biggest addiction.

The average Finn drinks four to five cups a day, which helps explain why they’re such a cafe society. and almost every public institution, including the main post office, has its own coffee shop. The expansive selection of cafes in Helsinki ranges from the quaint Engel, to the striking Aalto in the Academy Bookstore on the Esplanadi, to the hip Modesty at the Tennis Palace, built in 1938 for the Olympics but recently turned into a fetching Functionalist Cineplex. My favorite, though, was the Kahvila Cafe on the ground floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art, where the big green chairs look like minimalist thrones.

Though a waitress told me that Finns prefer meatballs above all, I found the food appetizing and sophisticated, from lingonberry pie at the Cafe Engel to a plate of whitebait and potatoes sauteed in a big wok at a stall in Market Square. I had a tasty tapas sampler with a glass of Spanish wine at Cafe Carelia near the opera, and treated myself to a fancy white asparagus and salmon dinner, followed by strawberries, at Savoy on the Esplanadi. It is easily the most stylish place in town, with gorgeous views and interior decoration designed by Alvar Aalto--right down to his signature Savoy vase.

Helsinki isn’t substantially more expensive than European capitals like Paris or London, and a week is not too long to spend there. In that time, I saw almost all the museums, including the intimate, old-fashioned Cygnaeus Gallery in Eira, featuring staid 19th century Finnish art; the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, with its astonishing bowed roof; and the Museum of Art and Design, where there’s an original Savoy vase made by Aalto in 1936. I went to a dance concert at the opera house, heard Sibelius’ Third Symphony at Finlandia Hall and saw “Ambush,” a compelling Finnish movie about two young lovers set on the Russian front during World War II (there were no English subtitles, but I got the gist).

I also took a ferry to Suomenlinna Island to see the stone fortress built by the Swedes, starting in 1748, and bought my niece a funny pair of Marimekko socks. And I even attended a tango evening (improbable though it seems, the dance is very big in Finland).

Now I know Helsinki, I think. But I still don’t know the Finns.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Handling Helsinki

Getting there: There is no direct service from LAX to Helsinki, but Finnair, Finland’s national carrier, flies from New York to Helsinki (a seven-hour flight) daily; a special summer round-trip fare of $625 expires June 30. Norvista, Finnair’s tour company, is a good source for package deals; telephone (800) 526-4927. From the Helsinki airport, it’s a $30 taxi ride to city center; no tips required. Another option is the Finnair bus, which leaves the airport every 20 minutes, stops at the Hotel Inter-Continental Helsinki and the main railway station, and costs about $5. Getting around: Helsinki Cards for one, two or three days ($22, $28 and $33 respectively) afford access to museums, public transport, a free sightseeing tour and discounts on events. Available at the tourist office at Pohjoisesplanadi 19, local tel. 169-3757.

Where to stay: The Hotel Inter-Continental Helsinki, Mannerheimintie 46-48, reservations (800) 327-0200 or tel. 011-358-9-40551, fax 011-358-9-4055-3255, is in a large, modern building across the street from the opera, with several restaurants, an indoor pool and sauna; rates for a double are $247 to $353. Sokos Hotel Torni, Yrjonkatu 26, tel. 011-358-9-131-131, fax 011-358-9-131-1361, was built in 1929 and has 154 Art Deco-style rooms; rates for doubles, $100 through Aug. 11. Hotel Anna, Annankatu 1, tel. 011- 358-9-616-621, fax 011-358-9- 602-664, is a clean budget hotel near the Eira district; about $125.

For more information: Scandinavian Tourist Board of Finland, P.O. Box 4649, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10163; tel. (212) 885-9700, Internet https://www.mek.fi/us.