Don’t try Helsinki in the off season, no matter what the brochures say. The Finnish capital’s time is now, right now, high summer, when daylight lasts for 20 giddy hours out of 24, when the sidewalk cafes and the waterside markets are thronged by handsome, hardy people, when the procession of crayfish feasts builds toward a climax, and when the pale blue waters of the lakes and the harbor and the white bark of the birch trees match the national flag.
Seen at its radiant best, Helsinki can be hypnotic. It has held me in its thrall for decades with its genius for modern design, displayed in textiles by Marimekko, ceramics by Arabia and glassware by Iittala, created by the likes of Kaj Franck, Timo Sarpaneva, Tapio Wirkkala, Alvar Aalto and Eliel Saarinen, to say nothing of those nifty orange-handled scissors made by Fiskars. Some names are less familiar than they should be — Aalto stands, in my view at least, with Wright, Mies and Le Corbusier at the apex of 20th-century architecture — but certainly not through any fault of their own.
For a time, the tradition seemed moribund, but it proved to be only dormant. Marimekko, whose chic, simple frocks Jacqueline Kennedy prized, has found a fresh new streak of creativity; the work of young and not-so-young designers from around the world (like the witty Briton Tom Dixon at Artek) can be seen in Finnish cutlery and furniture; and a sparkling new design district has come into being to show it off.
A nation of barely 5,250,000 souls (compare Wisconsin, with 5,536,000), where most people speak a language that is a distant cousin of Hungarian and largely incomprehensible to other Europeans, Finland — and Helsinki, its cultural, commercial and political center — has had to work hard to make its mark. It has succeeded beyond any rational expectations, not in a single sphere but in many.
The Finnish sauna has conquered the world, as have Finnish athletes from the distance runner Paavo Nurmi to the hockey star Teemu Selanne to the Formula One driver Mika Hakkinen. Nokia mobile phones are used in every corner of the globe. Grasping the classical torch from the great composer Jean Sibelius, Finnish musicians have ranged far from their remote Nordic base — Esa-Pekka Salonen reigning as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Karita Mattila as a prima donna in the great opera houses of New York, London, San Francisco, Paris and Vienna.
Yet the Finns have a not wholly undeserved reputation as a silent, humorless and melancholy people. Their outlook on life is often summed up in the word “sisu,” which denotes a grim determination to do what must be done, regardless of circumstances — the kind of gritty perseverance that helped Finland survive for decades beneath the dark cloud of the Soviet Union. The Finns’ psychic isolation is especially marked during the long, gloomy winters, when tens of thousands of them seek solace in a peculiarly Finnish kind of tango — not “the groin-grinding, passionate Latin American version,” as Morley Safer once wrote, “but a sad shuffle in a minor key.”
The sun burns all that away. Helsinki may be the world’s second most northerly capital city, after Reykjavik, and it may be lapped by the Baltic, but it can feel almost Mediterranean on a fine August day, with soft, golden light bathing the pastel-colored Italianate buildings around Senate Square, a legacy from Russian rule in the 19th century, and ferries, cruise ships and trawlers filling in a lively marine backdrop.
