Finland's capital markets
Indoor markets can be great places to eat lunch in Finland. At least, that’s the conclusion drawn from a recent visit to Helsinki and its predecessor as the country’s capital, Turku. Their aisles are lined with counters selling all manner of dishes, from reindeer to fresh fish. They may also offer the opportunity to chat to the locals. So it was in Hakaniemi.
We had already tried creamy salmon soup, the near ubiquitous Finnish staple, in the Helsinki’s red and cream brick Old Market Hall, which dates from 1889 and is a much bigger draw for tourists. A large bowl, full of salmon chunks and cubed potatoes and heaped with dill, cost €15, or about £13.
Tourists were much thinner on the ground in Hakaniemi’s hall, two Metro train stops from the capital’s central station. where we bought open gravadlax sandwiches so delicious we went back to the counter for more, eating them at a nearby table, where we were joined by two separate residents of mature age who were out shopping. A former woman architect struck up a conversation with my wife. My new companion expressed surprise that we had come to the market. He had been buying fish for dinner. He had lived in Hungary, so we discussed the tenuous connection between Finnish and Hungarian, another Uralic language (most Finns speak excellent English). We say they are about as close as Finnish and Russian, he told me.
It was decades since my previous trip to Helsinki but I recalled being less than excited by it. So I planned to spend some hours in galleries and museums. Today it is so vibrant that we visited hardly any. There were two exceptions, however, one tiny, the other enormous. The first was the Burgher’s House Museum in the Kruununhaka district, built over 200 years ago and the city’s oldest wooden residential building, which has been refreshed and refurnished as it would have been when it was the home of a bourgeois family who lived there from 1859. Albums of fading photographs and a wonderful guide brought it to life.
The second exception was Oodi, the architecturally spectacular six years old central library. It’s much more than a place to borrow books, though the third floor, about the size of a football pitch and with a balcony facing the Parliament building, has so many they use three robots to fetch and replace them. It’s a vast community centre, with places to eat and drink, where a library ticket allows you to borrow acoustic or electric guitars and practice playing them in a studio. There are studios where you can edit film or convert old videos to digital. In the “Urban Workshop” you can use a variety of equipment, including 3D printers. At one table two Ukrainian women used sewing machines to mend trousers. Four teenagers played video football in a glass cubicle, while on the ground floor people concentrated on chess at a bank of tables.
At other times we just explored, using the superb tram network and the city transport system’s excellent app, and walking many miles - down to the south shore, for example, with its long waterfront stunning on a summer day of glittering sunlight and taking in some of the city’s attractive art nouveau buildings.
There was much walking in Turku, too, a train ride of some 3hrs to the west, mostly along the delightful Aura riverfront. It took us to the medieval castle, whose King’s State Room hosted many Swedish kings, when they ruled Finland.
And we crossed the Aura to the cathedral and up the hill to Luostarinmaki, ahe fascinating collection of centuries old houses - some still lived in - that survived the Great Fire of 1827. You could spend a half day ducking through low doors and reading painstakingly researched descriptions of the lives led by those who slept and worked there: the shoemaker who used hog bristles to sew his leather, Simon the bookbinder, who came here from Vilnius, then part of Poland when Finland had been swallowed by the Russian Empire, and who could obtain citizenship only if he renounced his Jewish faith.
We lunched in Turku’s market hall, too. Salmon soup again. In Helsinki we had sought out Ravintola Nolita, a small neighbourhood restaurant and bakery down near the docks where the food was delicious and the service charming. Locals queued outside for mains such as an exceptional house burger (€17), fried gnocchi, seasonal mushrooms and courgette (€19) or fish of the day with asparagus and mussel beurre blanc (€28).
Arriving back there on our last day there was just time to nip down to the capita’s harbourside Old Market Hall again. to grab an early dinner: stupendous plates of mixed cold fish, from smoked salmon to herring in various sauces. It was a bit of a rushed job, leaving us with but one regret from a trip that had begun with some scepticism: there was no opportunity to linger. As with the other markets we had visited, it closed at 6pm - and most of its eateries finished serving even earlier
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