Bill B.
Yelp
June 2012.
It's too beautiful to spend the day inside, so we visit Seurasaari. A century ago, an ethnographer named Axel Olai Heikel began collecting traditional Finnish structures out on this island. Sweden already had an open-air museum like that (Swedes!), so Heikel decided that Finland should have one, too.
The number 24 bus drops us off at the entrance an hour before the island closes, so we rush to the ticket booth and grab a map, hoping to squeeze as much of Finland's glorious architectural heritage as we can into sixty minutes.
We read that there are historical re-enactors in the buildings, so we're expecting a Finnish version of Colonial Williamsburg, with artisanal baking demonstrations and maybe some farriery or blacksmithing. Coopering. That kind of thing. But the re-enactors we encounter are mostly high school kids with attitude whose summer job is to hang out on the island wearing period costumes and make sure no one tags the traditional structures or steals stuff.
We hustle through a series of smoke cabins, crofter's dwellings, granaries, and farmyards. We glimpse a wooden church. We spot a parsonage. We read that many of these buildings are the last surviving examples of early 19th-century Finnish architecture. They're lovely, these rustic wooden structures with elegant joinery and stripped down minimalism that look like something Alvar Aalto might have built if he'd been a crofter.
