Long before "good fats" and "omega-3" became sexy, before bagels & lox and the bento box, salmon was appreciated as the wonderful fish it is up here in Lapland. This is the sort of fish you can base a civilization around - and that's just what the Sámi who gave up reindeer hunting and herding in the 16th century did. They switched to the 'red meat of the sea,' as I like to call it. And they took to the Teno and Näätämö Rivers, which are just swimming with them.
The Teno (or Deatnu "Great River" as it is called in Sámi) is Europe's most important salmon river. Around 20% of all European river salmon are caught in the Teno. The world record for largest Atlantic salmon (79 pounds) was caught here in 1929. Most serious angler are happy to get a 40 pounder, a dream fish for most, but a more common occurrence in the Teno than all other salmon rivers combines. Postcards around these parts show beaming fishermen holding catches the size of a grade schooler. The river itself is beautiful, thin and marshy at some points, as wide as a lake at others. It stretches 210 miles, but when you count its tributaries, you've got a whopping 620 miles of salmon rich water.
Sámi people have depended on and honored the salmon rivers of northern Finland for thousands of years. As their rights were being defined by the Finnish government, at the end of the 1970s, salmon fishing in the Teno and Näätämö were recognized as essential parts of the Sami culture. So, the people of this area have constitutional rights protecting their use of the river. The Sami government is consulted before any fishing laws are drawn up. For example, worries about salmon farming in the vicinity have headed necessary regulations. Visiting anglers are not allowed to fish from a boat unless a local is employed as rower.
Norway and Finland share ownership of the great salmon river, as it literally draws the northwestern borderline between the countries. If you wanted to be very specific, the border runs straight down the middle. Around 250 years ago, the river marked the line between Sweden and Norway. This yellow "King's Stone" marked the spot in 1766. Nowadays, the area on both sides are really just referred to as Lapland and while the Norwegian and Finnish governments have been cooperating on fishing regulations since 1878, it is generally regarded to be more "Sámi' than anything else.
Even more than reindeer, salmon has transitioned seamlessly and successfully into the modern iteration of "cash cow" for the locals of Lapland. While many leisure tourists would like to spot Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, way more people would love to catch Sammy the pink-fleshed salmon. (I just made that character up. Let's just go with it). Tourism may keep the community afloat as local salmon fishermen are less and less able to compete with the lower prices of farmed salmon. The Sámi people would like to stick to traditional methods of fishing with nets and rods, but are not able to catch the large numbers they'd need to truly compete. There's also the scary truth that farmed fish have been spreading bacteria to the wild salmon population in these subarctic rivers. It's an ongoing battle.
For now, though, wild salmon can be enjoyed far and wide in Finland. At
the gas station restaurant in Ivalo, at the lunch buffet next to
reindeer ragu and whole heads of cauliflower au gratin was a big
cauldron of salmon soup. Creamy salmon soup is a Finnish mainstay. It
pops up everywhere, beyond just Lapland, and is always basically the
same. It is brothy with just enough cream to add a warm milkiness. The
chunks of salmon stand out like gems and the cubes of potato add a
silky heartiness. More elegant than a chowder, chunkier than a bisque,
it is dependable and delicious at a road stop cafeteria or in a dining
room.
Salmon almost stole the show at the Baltic Herring Fair in Helsinki. Thanks to the Teno and Näätämö,
Finns have long had a relationship with the fish. They've had a long
time to figure out new and different ways to smoke, cure, cook it. The
salmon stands at the Herring Fair
resembled deli counters one minute and bakery displays another. There
were cylinders with the criss-crossed twine markings of a smoked ham,
spirals filled with cheese sat pretty in cupcake wrappers like frosted
cinnamon buns. Steaks, nuggets, strips, loaves. Finns really have
thought of it all.
At the Hotelli Inari, in far northern Finland, people come more to drink than to sleep. There are beds upstairs, according to a pricelist, but we're not sure what kind of rough-edged person might sleep in them.
Downstairs in the bar, a full range of Lapland characters came out on a recent Wednesday night. Bleary eyed men sat slumped over beers. Young women in perfume and high-heels gathered to laugh and chat. A group of Norwegians were in town to celebrate something. Inari is a Sámi town, on the shore of a many-armed lake of the same name. The arctic circle is some two hundred miles south. There are four different languages spoken in Inari's woods and along the back roads. A man and woman came to set up Karaoke in the bar. When they turned on the machines, a waitress told them to wait a bit - the music was too loud for the regulars. This is the slow-simmering life in Finnish Lapland.
The landscape in this part of the world is flat, wet and mossy. Lakes and ponds appear everywhere in the northern forests, and dry land can seem only temporarily firm - walk anywhere in these woods, and you'll find places where the ground is soggy and soft with water. Lake shores aren't exactly distinct boundaries, the liquid bleeds into the low rock like watercolor paint over a pencil line. One could get lost forever here, in such featureless space.
In October, the Arctic days didn't feel too short, but the feeling of darkness approaching had soaked into everything.
Why would people live here, when it seems so much like a wasteland? Reindeer and salmon.
Finnish Lapland is also called Sápmi, just as the indigenous Lapp people are known as Sámi in their native tongues. The native people have lived here for thousands of years because their home is extraordinarily rich in food. Even today, fishermen pull sixty pound salmon from the Tana river, and herds of reindeer are kept in the forests and fells. We came across these traditional riverboats up near the border with Norway. Boats like these are used for checking and maintaining the Sámi salmon nets that are strung from trellises in the water. Nowadays, angling is more popular than netting. We passed many signs advertising fishing excursions on the roadsides.
Driving in Lapland is a hypnotic experience. Trees and water pass, the horizon opens and closes, the distances become almost theoretic. In some ways, it reminded me of traveling in the American west, where two hours away is "close by."
When a house or a gas station does pop up, it's an event. At Kaamasen Kievari, which sits somewhere close to two intersections, a traveler can eat, drink, sleep, gamble, send mail or just get some diesel and coffee. It's not a big place, but it has most of what anybody could need. The menu was heavy on reindeer, most of the daytime crowd was drinking, the sound of slot machines was a quiet constant. The road outside is flat and fast through the trees. If you don't need to stop, there's no reason to slow down.
A big part of the local economy here is Norwegian bargain shopping. Finland's wealthier neighbors come across the border to buy beer, liquor and gasoline. Näätämö is a nothing town. It's no more than a few muddy parking lots, two supermarkets, some rusting cars and fuel pumps. There aren't any houses - at least, none that you can see from the road. We know someone must live in Näätämö; there was a row of mailboxes beside the K-market. The border is ten minutes away. Square-jawed men and women come down from the northern fjords with petrol cans and leave with bottles of vodka.
We felt, traveling here, that even manmade things had somehow become wild. There are boats everywhere, but we never saw one out on the water. They just sat, pulled up onto the shore, filling up with rainwater, their engines taken off, looking more like driftwood than transportation. Log trucks are common, but seem more animal than human as they careen down dirt roads. Mailboxes sit on the roadsides, with no house in sight - they look like giant mushrooms that have sprung up in the rain.
Ivalo stands out as a metropolis in this emptiness, with its few supermarkets and three roundabouts. We pulled into one of the two gas stations for lunch. Dolly Parton was on the radio, men in chainsaw chaps stood by their pickups outside. The lunch buffet was popular with the locals - people sat down quietly with trays of reindeer-hamburg pasta and squash soup. There were video slot machines at some of the tables, two euros for five shots. Some of the old men wore cowboy hats. Included in the price: coffee, bread, salad, herring, juice and lingonberries in syrup.
Finnish Lapland doesn't feel particularly European. In a lot of ways it feels like parts of remote middle America - I was reminded of Michigan's upper Peninsula more than once. The people are of a similar type: independent, citizens of vast spaces. That's not to say that it felt American either. Maybe better to say that there's a kinship between northern places, as though the circular world near the pole is a separate continent from those attached southern extremities. Every part of life here is edged in tradition, but the existence is modern - the Sámi part of the land's identity is a picture frame, not the whole portrait.
We stopped the car often to get out and look at one lake or another. Sometimes the water stretched miles into the distance, sometimes it was just a pool in the grass. We got caught up photographing the reflections of trees and rocks. It rained and cleared up. We hoped to see northern lights at night, but there was nothing but darkness and clouds. Lapland in October is a meditation more than experience.
Never ask a Sámi person how many reindeer they have. We couldn't help but wonder, though, as we stayed on a reindeer farm in Sevettijärvi, would we get to see any? How many are there around? There were droppings on the property, confirming their existence and Merlin could tell that they were fresh enough to signal close reindeer
proximity. Those are true country boy skills right there. But a reindeer 'farm' is very different than the name implies. These are wild animals, only partially domesticated. To keep your reindeer is to follow them, gather them, mark them, not confine them. So, did we see any reindeer? We sure did. This is the land of the reindeer, far above the Arctic Circle and even mating season (which it was while we were in Lapland) couldn't keep the reindeer completely out of sight.
To ask about the number in someone's herd would be like saying, "hey, how much money have
you got in the bank?" Until very recently, reindeer husbandry was the core of the Sámi economy. The animals were a currency. In fact, when we asked one of the older schoolchildren in Sevettijärvi why the language textbook they'd sweetly presented us with had a picture of small reindeer bones on the cover, we were told that those were game pieces. "It is a Skolt game," the thirteen year old explained. You throw them on the ground and whichever ones land a certain way are reindeer. "Whoever has the most reindeer wins." So, basically, it's a very ancient version of Monopoly. Until the 1600s, Sámi people lived as nomads, following reindeer as they migrated. These journeys brought them over borders, being defined at that time as Russia, Sweden and Denmark. The governments of each (and sometimes all three) began to tax the Sámi people and, with no hard currency, they paid with hides and meat. The need to generate more income in order to pay taxes led to over-hunting and a sharp decrease in the number of reindeer. There was a threat of extinction.
Many Sámi chose to settle along fjords and switch mainly to fishing. Others decided to employ the same methods they'd seen Scandinavian shepherds use with their flocks of sheep. The men began taming small groups of reindeer and herding them from place to place as needed. The women made clothing and blankets from the fur, boots from the skins, tools from antlers and even cheese from the reindeer's milk. These reindeer herders, though a minority, became what is now seen as the 'archetypical' Sámi. As systematic (and sometimes sadistic - in cases of female sterilization) assimilation measures were taken by Scandinavian and Russian governments, the communities most reliant on reindeer husbandry were the ones who held on most tightly to their culture. There's a direct correlation between the survival of Sámi dialects and traditions and the importance of herding in those communities. You can pretty much safely put the reindeer at the center of modern Sámi identity.
Of course, they also ate the meat. While you'd probably be hard pressed to find any reindeer milk products around Lapland, reindeer meat is very common. Most often, it is sauteed, resembling beef stir fry or cheese steak shavings, served with lingonberries and potatoes. For some reason that we can't figure out, the reindeer in Lapland tastes much more like beefsteak than venison. There is no gaminess and the flesh is tender enough to not necessitate it being cooked super rare. Other common preparations are dried and cured sausages, sliced thin and eaten as a breakfast and lunch meat. Reindeer soup made some appearances as well. Canned reindeer stew, reindeer chunks and reindeer meatballs showed up all around Finland - not just Lapland. It has grown from being a local delicacy to a national culinary tradition, as Sámi culture has become more widely accepted and respected in recent decades.
Above, a particularly delicious baked reindeer steak with rye and thyme crumble, forest mushrooms and artichoke puree. This was at Ravintola Aanaar in Inari. The town is considered the center of Sami culture in Finland. Merlin ate this (and I had Lake Inari whitefish) in a small dining room adjacent to the main banquet hall. A group of around 50 people had been filing in all evening and now sat enjoying a meal and some live, traditional music. "Is it a wedding?" we asked. "Oh, no. Just a gathering of Sámi people." Many had arrived in traditional costume, some wore name tags. "It happens all the time." Inari is also home to Siida, a really wonderful museum dedicated to Sámi culture and the nature of Northern Lapland. Siida is a North Sámi word for a reindeer village and much of the permanent exhibition, naturally, was dedicated to herding and husbandry.
This old record book shows a series of earmarks and the families and family members they represent. Every summer, the calves that are born the spring before are rounded up and small cuts and patterns are made in their ears. This marks ownership. Thousands of earmarks exist, children have different ones than their parents, siblings and so on. The best herders earn the most intricate patterns, Natalia explained to us. "Mine was one no one wanted." She owned some reindeer (of course, we didn't ask how many) at one point. Her earmark pattern was simple enough that it could easily be turned into another. So, one by one, her reindeer began to disappear. Finally, she sold them off before she had none left. "I knew who it was and was mad for a while. But it is all a part of it." She told us of the skill involved with knowing exactly where to find every one of your reindeer depending on the wind, the surface of the snow, how old they are. The Sámi have hundreds of words for 'reindeer,' including one for each year of a reindeer's life.
Only around 10% of today's Sámi count reindeer husbandry as their primary source of income. That doesn't make the animals any less important, though. Tourism in Lapland depends a lot on people wanting to come up and see Dasher and Dancer et al. At our homestay, Natalia told us about Spaniards zipping around on snowmobiles they'd never ridden before, trying to find some reindeer. "I was running around with a first aid kit." Other guests think that going right up to one and petting it is a good idea. "They even think they can ride them!" Most tourist material for the area involves snowmobile and dog-sled tours to go out and spot some reindeer. Thankfully, absolutely nowhere is there the opportunity to go out on a hunt. I was happy to see some of the beautiful animals, even if they were just fleeting glances. And, at night, I even dreamed of reindeer (though our pillowcases may have had something to do with that).
Yesterday we reached the geographic zenith of the trip. This bridge - crossed in the far reaches of Lappish Norway, on our way from one part of Finland to another - sits at 70°198947 N. The name of this place is Tana Bru. There were a few low buildings, a store, leafless trees, grey skies, the swift Tana river and a small, wet pull off where we could park. From there, our road turned back down towards the equator.
The experience had us thinking about the other extreme points of the trip, where we'd been the furthest east, west and south. Here's our little cartography project.
It seems that we always reach these geographic extremes during cloudy, dismal weather. It was a cold, windy day on the southern coast of Cyprus when we walked the Limassol shoreline, at 34°664911 N. There were stacks of unused beach chairs and faded signs for "ombrellas," a few fishermen, rocky sand, strip clubs and blank holiday apartments. Cyprus certain can feel like the sunny south, but in those earliest days of March we had no desire to swim. From the beach, it's about two hundred and forty miles south to Port Fuad, Egypt.
Looking for lighthouses and glaciers, we rounded the western tip of Iceland's Snæfellsnes Peninsula, which is the furthest west we reached in our westernmost country (-23°973541 E). The Azores are more westerly, but we don't intend to go.
The land out on the Snæfellsnes was dominated by volcanic rock and bright-green grass. The waterside cliffs were full of bird nests, the air was full of mist. It's a land of myth, and the local volcano was chosen by Jules Verne as the entry point into the center of the earth.
More than three thousand miles east, on the polluted shores of the Caspian sea, Baku was our other longitudinal extreme. Oil derricks and harbor cranes hung in the sky, the city was gnawing itself to pieces. Azerbaijan isn't a pretty place, and the Caspian was tar black in the January light.
The culture there is as much Asian as European, a mixture of Islam, Russia and its own independent fire. Taking a night train overland through the dessert from Georgia, we awoke to grey scrub and brown earth. The sea and the city, when we got there, seemed like the last place on earth.
As nearly as we can figure it, we reached 49°887371 E.
So, if these were our poles, where was the middle? After some quick calculations, it seems that the east-west, north-south midpoint of our trip lands at 52°431929 N, 12°956915 E, which is about ten miles west of Berlin.
We've actually been to one (dubiously accurate) geographic center of Europe, in the Belarusian town of Polotsk. It didn't feel like the middle, though. Berlin seems much more accurate, even if our methods are a little unscientific.
It's not that often that you're hostess catches, guts and cooks your dinner over an open flame, but that's just what happened at our homestay in Sevettijärvi. Natalia, who did most of this with her handful of a 10 month old daughter balanced on her hip, was tickled with the catch. "I didn't actually expect to get a fish!" she laughed, struggling to remove her hook from the beautiful lake trout's mouth. Ice-fishing is second nature to her, but this was her very first big non-icy catch. "I have to show my sisters!" she giggled shooting off a picture text on her phone. Her older sister, who is a member of Sámi parliament and the
preeminent Skolt Sámi rock musician ceded the title of "family rock star" for the day. Her younger sister asked her to save the skin. "She wants it for her
handicrafts - to make a purse, probably," Natalia explained. "Skolt
Sámi use every part of the fish."
Skolt Sámi are the indigenous people of the area at which Finland,
Norway and Russia meet. There are around 1250 ethnic Skolts in the
world today. About 700 live in Finland and 315 of them reside right here in
Sevettijärvi, a village just south of the northernmost border between Norway and Finland. We stayed on Natalia's family reindeer farm in Sevettijärvi for two nights and couldn't have been given better insight into Skolt Sámi culture. Natalia's knack for storytelling was keen, her laughter infectious. She told us about meeting her husband at Sevetin Baari, the local bar. "I was the only single girl for 100 kilometers!" And about being the only female in her elementary school class, "I've seen it all." She
spoke of her grandfather, a reindeer herder, who was famous for tea that could wake the dead, and her grandmother, who was tiny but fierce.
"Skolt Sámi are short, but she was the shortest," Natalia said of her grandmother who stood only one meter
tall, but commandeered big dogs and reindeer like a general. "If she wasn't good with humans, she was excellent with animals." Grandma had seven children, one of which was birthed during a routine reindeer feeding in the dead of winter. Out in the snowy woods, Domna tied her skirt together at the bottom and skied home. Stricken with dementia at the end of her nearly 100 year long life (by the family's best guess), grandma began to show some vulnerability. "Take me home," she'd plead, referring to Petsamo on what is referred to locally as "the lost arm" of Finland.
51 Skolt Sámi families were forced to resettle here after their home was signed over to Russia at the end of the 1940s. She'd pull her grandmother around on a sled attached to the back of a snowmobile. Up and over and down and back they'd loop to her house, which Domna no longer recognized. "Here you are! Home!" Natalia would cheerfully announce and grandma would
thank her for returning her to the lost arm.
Sevettijärvi has only been accessible by car since 1970. Before then, Skolts got around by snowmobile, reindeer, skis and boat. "Mostly, we just stayed here," a teacher at the local school told us with humorous bluntness. The new road brought ease of access and it also brought Toini, Natalia's mother, who met and married a Skolt Sámi man and had two daughters and one on the way when he died of cancer. Not Sámi herself, she still chose to remain in Sevettijärvi, raising her daughters with a deep sense of their Sámi identity and eventually becoming principle of the local Skolt school. For income, she turned her home into a campsite and travelers inn with the help of the local women's community. "The cabin you're sleeping in was built by five grandmothers," Natalia laughed, but also said with pride. Sámi women are strong - and (honorary Skolt) Toini, and the women she's raised are some of the strongest.
While we were there, a new barbecue house was being delivered. Our freshly caught dinner was prepared in the older, bigger one, an octagonal log building with a fire pit with chimney at the center. Groups come here throughout the high season, from April until September. Snowmobilers that make too much noise, hikers that routinely get lost, bachelor parties that trash the place. Tourism is a tricky thing and it's an ongoing struggle to gauge how much is worth it or not. The Skolt Sámi depend a lot on tourism. Aside from reindeer herding, it is their livelihood. But this is also a people who are very in tune with nature, who want to continue to strike the right balance with their animals and their environment. More than anything, the people here want to make sure their culture and traditions don't die out.
Of course, this has the most to do with future generations. We were invited to visit the local school and meet the students, numbering only 9 at the
moment. When Natalia was in school, there were 100. There is a gap in school aged children right now. The district covers such a long area that two children actually live 100 kilometers apart from one another. "Must make birthday parties difficult," Merlin quipped. We were sung a traditional Skolt song and then Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star in Skolt Sámi, Swedish and Finnish. When we left, we were presented a Skolt Sámi language text book, signed by all the children. It is the first book of its kind, published only two years ago and worked on by one of the teachers at the school. Until 1977,
Finnish law forbade the teaching of Sámi language in school.
Across from the school is The Church of St. Tryphon of Pechenga and its cemetery, which the teachers implored as to go visit. "There is a very special moss." The Orthodox cemetery is the only spot in Sevettijärvi that has always been fenced off. So, the beautiful white moss has been protected from nibbling reindeer for decades. It has been growing and flourishing. Skolt Sámi is an endangered language. Only around 400 of the 1250 ethnic Skolts in the world
can speak Skolt Sámi, most of whom live in Sevettijärvi. So, what happens here is important. This is the spot where it can grow and flourish. Natalia hopes that there will be a generational shift, a renewed appreciation in language as part of Skolt tradition.
For her part, Natalia is working on a children's book in the language. One doesn't currently exist for her daughter or that age range. It is about a bird who overhears her parents talking every night about flying back home to a home that is lost. "And all the bird can think is this is our home."
Our dinner trout, with flesh as pink as salmon, was caught in an undisclosed location. There is an unspoken Skolt
Sámi law that if you have a building on a lake, that body of water is
'yours.' But, still, you don't want everyone knowing that your lake is
stocked with big, beautiful trout. "It is a well kept secret," Natalia
told us.
"Is that this week? There are so many happening in Helsinki, it is hard to keep up." - the woman who runs our hostel. The Helsinki Baltic Herring Fair certainly IS happening this week, all week, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a happening that would get us as excited as a 270 year old annual festival dedicated to herring. As Merlin recently waxed poetic about in Sweden, we both think herring is a small, simple dose of perfection. Luckily, there were plenty of other people who were well aware of the Herring Fair. And on Opening Day, the crowds at the Port of Helsinki were thick. The excitement was palpable.
The fishing boats had been arriving all weekend and Sunday morning, they officially opened up shop. The Fair has been held at the beginning of October every year, without fail, since 1743. That's 70 years before this even became capital of Finland. In the beginning, Helsinki was just a port town that was easily reached by the nearby islands and the Åland archipelago. So, it was the entry point for Baltic herring to the mainland and the annual fair would determine herring prices for that year throughout the country. The participating vessels needed to show proof that all the fish on board had been caught and processed by that fishing boat and its owner. It's a rule that still applies today.
Back in the day, the fierce competition would drive fishermen to unsavory behavior. Things are more friendly today. Still, I wondered, all day long, how people chose which back-of-the-boat they'd buy their herring and bread from. The pickled, marinated and salted fish on hand were almost identical from place to place. There were probably some people who are from the same town or island as the vendor. Others may have been drawn by the decorations or the free samples. But mostly, people matched up as you'd expect them to. Nice older ladies went to nice older ladies. Gruffer guys went to gruffer guys. Families went to boats that had their own little tykes helping out.
The Herring Fair used to mark the end of the fishing season. Harvest Time. It's that time of year that you begin to think about your cupboard and in the first two centuries of the Fair, it was especially important for folks on the mainland to stock up on protein reserves for the long winter ahead. The cold Autumn water would bring in a wealth of herring and sprats,
which needed to be caught, canned and sold before ice made any trips in
or out of the harbor impossible. Today, the herring at the fest isn't just seen as sustenance. The offerings are creative, colorful (and, in some cases, perishable). The can has mostly given way to the more visually enticing plastic tub, in which rowanberry, mustard, pepper, garlic, sliced carrot and beets are all locked away with the silver fish
Two stages were set up, a Mainstage and a Small Stage, and the Opening Day entertainment was decidedly fishy. Finnish celebrity chefs Sami Garam & Janne Pekkala ran back and forth between the stages, handling the schedule of events mostly by themselves. At a kitchen set up, they'd cook up herring recipes and banter with each other and the crowd. Up on the Mainstage, they introduced Duo Timjan who sang "songs of the sea in the spirit of Helsinki." On the small stage, they ran the Herring Filleting Competition, duking it out themselves and then bringing two laymen onstage to get their hands bloody. (They say that the Baltic herring is particularly hard to fillet, with a spine smaller than its Atlantic cousin.) The two men also moderated a panel of discerning tasters who took their Market Food Jury duties very seriously. Other competitions included "The Most Beautiful Fishingboat Competition" and the, probably most important, "Herring Product Competition." That judging was kept a little more private.
Like any great fair or food festival, there was a plethora of eating options. This wasn't the type of fair with easily handheld food or generic
treats. Nor was it one where the smell of sweet or fried (or sweet and
fried) things eclipsed all other odors. October and ocean weren't
buried under waffle and fry. Stalls filled the main and market squares and dozens of picnic tables allowed for unhurried savoring. While herring wasn't the piece de resistance of the prepared foods scene at the fair, we managed to find some excellent Baltic herring soup, served with an already split and buttered piece of Åland bread. It was just about as good as you can get on an October afternoon (as was the non-alcoholic glogg and heart-shaped spice cookie we followed it up with).
There was a hot dog van tucked away and a few strips of bacon on one of the giant skillets, but it was essentially meat-free. See? Not your typical fair to say the least. The best part was the Finnish-ness of it all. The Helsinki Baltic Herring Fair has grown from its roots in some modern directions, but none that feel disingenuous or that make this fair indistinguishable for others. Sure, there was a crepe griddle and a waffle press at work, but they were specks in a sea of Finnish pastries like karjalanpiirakat. These huge paella pans fried up heaping portions of crispy little muikko, (a smelt sized whitefish specific to the Baltic). Instead of french fries, fingerling potatoes and veggies were fried up alongside in bulk. There was smoked salmon on rye, fried salmon with crumbled blue cheese, salmon soup, salmon, salmon, salmon.
The salmon darn near stole the show with theatrics like this drool-inducing smoker/flame roaster. A red-faced husband and wife duo kept this baby going all afternoon long. She threw more wood on the fire. He fetched a slab when it was done and carved at it or sold it whole. Where there weren't flames and smoke, there was grease and sizzle. Then, there were the herb crusted logs of salami, that were actually salmon and the golden brown, cinnamon bun spirals that were - you guessed it, rolls of salmon. Herring was the star, but salmon was its shape-shifting side kick. It was the beef of this particular outdoor get together, the marbled lunch meat, greasy steaks, and flame broiled crowd favorite.
The Helsinki Baltic Herring Fest was refreshingly free of schlock. One guy sold balloons, but otherwise, the non-food items for purchase were steeped in 270 year tradition. A bulk of the fishermen at the fair have always come in from the Åland Islands. The vessels would arrive with fish, still alive and kept so by men who would stay up through the night rocking the boat back and forth to allow water to slosh in and keep the fish from dying. On board would also be black Åland bread and knitwear made from island sheep wool. Today, round loaves of Åland black bread are as plentiful as the herring and hand-knit socks hang from booms. We ran into the Albanus, which we'd seen filled with apples back on the archipelago. Here, the crates were unloaded and the fruit sold, alongside Åland applejuice. It was like seeing an old friend again. Perhaps the real reason the people of Helsinki have held onto their Herring Fest for so long is that it's a yearly meeting between mainlanders and islanders. It is the time-honored tradition of welcoming fellow Finns in from days, lives out on the sea.
Just a little video compilation of Opening Day at the 270th Annual Helsinki Baltic Herring Fest. Some groovy tunes, beautiful boats, spattering salmon oil, herring filleting competition footage, a panel of tasting jurors and people stuffing their faces with delicious food. Enjoy.
On a bright October morning, I boarded a fast train from Helsinki up to the town of Hämeenlinna, in the Finnish region of Tavastia. Fast European trains can be disconcerting. They marry speed and calmness so seamlessly that a chaos of landscapes becomes somehow pedestrian. I got off in a small city quieted by early Saturday - joggers and dog walkers were my company, all of the shops were shuttered. I'd come to look at a handsome old castle named Häme (Hämeenlinna in Finnish, "linna" means fortress) which sits at a narrow point in lake Vanajavesi. It was an easygoing day, and a pleasant one. The brick walls and narrow moat served as a backdrop for contemplation more than a reason for excitement.
Hämeenlinna is most interesting from across the water, when its catches the light and looks very grand. Inside, it's as drab and colorless as a middle-school - thanks to a 1980's renovation that saw the walls whitewashed, the addition of modern stairs and fluorescent lights, hallways opened up and excessive guard-railing. The most prominent feature, without exaggerating, is the spacious coat-check area. Walking around, there's virtually nothing to look at. It's like a museum between exhibitions; blank walls, scuffed floors, too many radiators, tiny windows that look out at nothing. It's a real shame, because Häme would make a great old pile. One can catch glimpses of narrow passageways and staircases (cordoned off from the public), and there are a few unrestored rooms with vestiges of… not much. Some of these contain folding chairs and pull-down projector screens.
Probably the highlight of the interior, in terms of medieval atmosphere, is the well room. The well itself is dry, but the chamber is suitably damp and dark. This is the lock on the old, metal-sheathed door.
On the far side of the water, in a wetland mess of cattails and reeds, someone has set up a boardwalk system. The way was narrow, but it let me get right out almost to the edge of the vegetation. A few inches of murky water covered the mud on either side; the growth, at its autumnal height, was above my head. Still, I was able to get a few photos before retreating to more solid land. I had a picnic on a half-sunken cement slab in the brush. There were a few crows overhead, and their calls echoed over the water.
Brick is an interesting castle material. In some parts of the world - like Holland and parts of Belgium - there isn't very much stone, so they built with brick. In some cases there was plenty of stone, but the architectural shapeliness of brick was more appealing. Hämeenlinna is a perfect example of this type of castle, and is somewhat rare for Scandinavia.
Häme was originally built as a stone garrison on a small island, sometime around the year 1300. The walls, at that point, were low and makeshift. The purpose of the fort was to enforce new taxes after the region had been brought under Swedish control. Almost nothing is known about this early period, though, and there's a lot of debate about when the structure was actually assembled. The brickwork mostly covers up the older stone, which was rough and not well cut. During the late 14th century, as the fortress was being enlarged, redbrick was used instead of the native greystone so that the overall effect would be more visually dramatic and impressive. In Finland - a conflict area at the time, and not very well off - this was almost unheard of, but it was common practice in other Swedish holdings across the Baltic. Castles like Cēsis and Sigulda in Latvia, as well as Trakai in Lithuania, were built in brick because of a combination of vogue and necessity.
Häme's most interesting period - to me, at least - was during the mid and late 1700's, when it served as a "crown bakery." Six huge ovens were built in the southern part of the castle, and a granary and wheat drying room were added above. Because it was somewhat outdated and there were a large amount of troops in the region, the Swedes decided that the castle might best function as a kind of industrial kitchen, to keep mouths fed and supplies close at hand. Again, not much information survives about the bakery, but a Russian survey in 1808 found that it could produce 1,500 lb. of bread and 900 lb. of rusks in one firing, which certainly sounds substantial.
Hämeenlinna is in a precarious position between Russia and the old Swedish empire, and so traded hands many times during its history. Because it was often under threat of attack, it was modernized repeatedly. Circular cannon batteries called "rondelles" were added at the end of the 16th century. (The rondelles, like many towers in the age of gunpowder, were circular to try to deflect enemy fire.) Soon after, earthen embankments were built up at some distance from the walls, so that cannons could be stationed at low and solid firing points. Today, these green humps obscure much of the old buildings, which is too bad. They are a nice place to sit and look out over the water, though.
