Visiting Finland's Medieval Castles 1: Turku Castle
Finland is a young country by European standards. Turku, its oldest city, is estimated to have been established at some point around 1229. Somewhat of a backwater, it lacked the constant wars, infighting and invasions found in more central European countries. Consequently, Finland made it through the medieval era without a lot of castles.
While Germany has roughly 25,000 castles, Finland has five.
This means that while visiting all of Germany’s castles in one lifetime is impossible (even if you didn’t visit the ones that are ruins), visiting Finland’s castles is completely doable. We made it our goal to visit all five of Finland’s medieval castles and I’m happy to report we succeeded.
The five medieval castles in Finland are Turunlinna (Åbo Slott, Turku Castle), Olavinlinna (St. Olaf’s Castle), Hämeenlinna (Tavastia Castle), Kastleholmen, and Raaseporin Linna (Raseborg Slott, Raseborg Castle).
The first one we visited was Turku Castle, because we lived in Turku.
Even before we moved to Finland, our visits there centered around Turku since that’s where most of my husband’s faminly lives. So at this point, I’ve been there more times than I can count. The first time was in 2004 when the exhibits in the castle (and, lets be honest, all around Turku) still only have captions in Finnish and Swedish. Back then, I knew so little Finnish I read the Swedish, hoping to glean some meaning from my knowledge of English and German. It didn’t work well. Nowadays the exhibits also have a Readers’ Digest version of the much longer (and much more informative) Finnish and Swedish version. I discovered this when I took my dad to visit the castle and we had some time to actually read the captions, which isn’t possible when you visit with small children. They like to speed run the castle. But with my dad, I had time to stop and read the castle for the first time since my original visit.
If you notice the captions are suspiciously longer in Finnish and also in Swedish, it may be worthwhile to get your phone out and use a translation app so you can get the whole story. These captions provide a lot more detail about local history someone decided non-local people wouldn’t be terribly interested in. FIND OUT WHAT THE FINNS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!
Doing a write up on Turku castle is hard, mainly because for us it wasn’t a tourist site. How to get there? Anyway you want. It’s so accessible. It’s right on the bus line that runs from the airport to the harbor. It’s also very easy to bike to from the center, or to walk to. We spent many pleasant days in Turku just going on a walk by the river, then by the castle. You can picnic in the park around the castle before going going home. It became a fixture of our lives, so much so that when I went through pictures for this post, I discovered I hadn’t actually taken any good ones of the castle’s exterior or profile while we lived there. I had to go back to our visit in 2016.
It’s strange to think, as an American, that you can just get used to having a castle around. “That? Oh yeah. Been here ages.” Shrug. But, like Turku’s Cathedral, it’s the sort of thing that when you see it, it lifts your spirits. It’s beautiful to look at. It reminds you of the history of the area, of the times in Europe where castles were needed not for tourism, but for defense and to show the local King/Prince/Whoever’s power and authority over a region.
Turku Castle lost its importance as a defensive structure very early on; unlike other Finnish castles they never made an attempt to convert it to a star fort or bastion. Due to post-glacial rebounding, Turku Castle is no longer on an harder-to-attack island, but part of the mainland. It’s close to the coast, close to the harbor, but no longer abuts the water. Did the castle’s builders know this would happen with time? Was there at some point some old man, standing by the castle bemoaning the fact that when he was young, there used to be an island there?
The land around the castle continues to rise. At some point, the Turku archipelago will be no more an archipelago than the mainland of Finland will be, unless sea level rise from climate change is a lot worse than I hope it will be. But Turku Castle? Will still be there, moving father inland without having moved an inch.