Suomenliina - Island fortress

On the weekend I had a visitor from Germania so I took off my unemployed-immigrant hat, put on my Official Tour Guide hat and headed out on the town. Of the many very typical things we did, sauna flagellation included, perhaps the nicest was to take the 20 min. ferry over to Suomenliinea, The Island Fortress.

Sauna fun

IMPORTANT NOTE HERE. When you go to Suomenliina you'll need to buy a ticket for the ferry. Make sure you do this with plenty of time to spare because the SINGLE ticket machine inevitably has a huge queue of people unfamiliar with said machine and if you're not careful you'll end up having to make a last minute dash/jump for the boat as it sails away from the quay.

Once on board head to the back of the boat to watch Helsinki sail away (sure as the sun goes round the earth) and get great views of the Cathedral and Giant cruise ships readying for their journey to Sweden.

HISTORY TIME. Suomenliina importance is a result of its geographical position. Perhaps this map will help.

Helpful map

Back in the olden times Finland (the green bit) was part of the Swedish empire. King Ryvita II decided that the island would be a useful place to defend his lovely pink land from the scary Russians to the east under Tzar Nicolas The Bear Wrestler, so he set about building a fortress there. At this time the island was incorrectly know as Sveaborg.

However, the fortress did little to resist the Russians and surrendered during the Russo-Swedish war. Russia, happy with their vacations, decided to stay (and annex the rest of Finland while they were at it) and things would stay like that for the next 110 years. 

In 1918 the Finns decided that it was revolution time (click here now) so they kicked out the Russians from island and mainland and installed a single ticket machine on the docks to ferry tourists to the newly named Suomenliina. Hooray. 

TODAY. The island is really lovely. It's a sort of mix of GOT (the bits in King's Landing) and LOTR*. Old ruins, windy cobbly streets, little tunnels, caves in grassy knolls, huge Russian cannons and everywhere the sea. As well as all that there aren't any cars and the best thing is that you can touch and climb on or pose next to pretty much everything. A brilliant day out. Go there. 

Here are lots of photos. 

*If you put GOT and LOTR together and say them out loud it's a word in Irish.