Gable decoration in Äänisniemi.
The Ignoi House, Särkilahti. The measured drawing of the facade by Tiina Salmela, HUT 1994.
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Exotic logs
Waves of Karelianism
The ground where the Finnish romantic myth of Karelia took root was the Grand Duchy of Finland (1809), confused by its new autonomous status. The answer to the question of the Finnish national identity and culture seemed to be found in the poems collected for the Kalevala (1835, 1849), by Elias Lönnrot, mostly in the White Sea region and eastern Karelia, which was interpreted in accordance with the romantic epic theory to be a factual guide to a bygone golden age of culture. The Karelians began to be seen as the custodians of the Finnish ‘Kalevalan’ tradition.
The national spirit inspired by discoveries of poetry and by years of oppressive Russification led artists and architects to the villages of Karelia in the 1890s. The architects looked to Karelia not just for a Finnish national building style but also for liberation from style architecture. The book by architects Yrjö Blomstedt and Victor Sucksdorff, Karjalaisia rakennuksia ja koristemuotoja (‘Karelian Buildings and Decorative Motifs, 1901) became a kind of architectural Kalevala. However, the Karelian building tradition was too primitive and Russian to form the basis of a national style of construction, and it merged with the mainstream of other ‘wooden styles’. The artists interpreted the spirit of the Karelian house in their romantic wilderness log studios, as in the case of the artist Akseli Gallén-Kallela’s Kalela (1893-95).
During the Second World War, Finland occupied Soviet Karelia as a territory inhabited by a kindred people. The vanishing national heritage was documented. Alvar Aalto was among those who made a study trip to Olonets (Finnish name Aunus). When Finland was forced to cede almost the whole of Karelia at the end of the war, the author Olavi Paavolainen said that the loss of Karelia was the same as Greece losing its Olympus, the scene of its mythology. In postwar romantic architecture, Karelianism was an oft-used theme. In the 1950s Karelia was buried as a politically sensitive subject. Architecture became more rational, and the interpretation of the Karelian building tradition was consigned to commercial reconstructions in historically strange locations.
The political atmosphere began to unfreeze in the 1980s, and postmodernism began to borrow from Karelian themes. Since cross-border tourism began to get easier in the 1990s, architects and students have studied Karelian villages and buildings all the way to the republic’s farthest reaches. Karelia still has plenty to attract one. It is a place one can find mysticism, symbolism, emotion, colour, heritage, another kind of aesthetics.
Netta Böök
Excerpt from
the article on the pages 70-75, ark 2/2000
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