In May of 2016, my partner and I set off on our first road trip in northern Europe. Earlier that year, her grandmother had unexpectedly decided that she wanted to go back to Sweden to see relatives there. Grandma is in her eighties, and while she's very healthy, she had become reticent to travel to non-English-speaking countries after her husband's death. So when she brought up gong back to Stockholm, the whole family jumped at the idea, and plans developed quickly. The sort of very complicated plans that happen when you're moving six people from three generations with different life circumstances.
Marissa and I both work for ourselves, and had the most flexible schedule, so ended up with the longest and most complicated plans. While the rest of the family was thinking about Sweden, we were thinking about where else we could go. Marissa has been very interested in Finland and Finnish history for years, and I love long road trips, so between us we came up with a pre-trip trip that would give us a tour of Finland and northern Sweden before meeting up with the rest of the family in Stockholm.
We flew into Helsinki and spent two days there, then drove to Turku for a day and a half. Those two are the Finnish cities that typically see a reasonable number of tourists, but we weren't stopping there. After that we drove a full day up the Gulf of Bothnia to Oulu. And while we loved all of those cities, and would happily go back, it was the last Finnish city we went to that blew us away: Rovaniemi.
Drive six kilometers on the other side of those bridges and you get to the Arctic Circle. By temperate standards Rovaniemi is a small city, with a population of 62,000, but in the Arctic that's huge. It's situated on the Kemi River, at the confluence where it's joined by the Ounas, and the Kemi is impressive.
I've spent most of my life living next to North America's longest and most important river, the Mississippi. I'm used to rivers; I thought I knew them well. But the Mississippi is broad in St. Louis, where I grew up. It's fast in Minneapolis, where I live now. The Kemi is broad and fast at the same time, and the experience is multiplied. There's a power and an epic quality to the river that I've never experienced anywhere else.
There are two bridges that cross the river. Jätkänkynttilä is the new one, a cable-stayed bridge built in 1989. It holds an eternal flame to commemorate the burning of the city in 1944. Rovaniemi had been occupied by the Nazis in World War II, and when they were finally forced out of the country by Finnish forces at the end of the war, they set out to destroy the town behind them. Ninety percent of the buildings in Rovaniemi were destroyed, leaving the town with a single historical even that shapes its identity. For this reason architecturally Rovaniemi is one of the youngest cities in Europe.
The second bridge is the Ounaskoski railway bridge, which serves trains, automobiles, and pedestrians. The original version of this bridge was built in 1934 and blown up by the Nazis. The current bridge was rebuilt in 1951. I'm particuarly partial to railroad truss bridges, and this is a great one. The speed of the river particularly comes through in the long-exposure photo below, as you can see the large hollows formed when the river hits the piers.
I tend to focus on water, but Rovaniemi has more to offer. There's the Arktikum, an excellent museum of Arctic geography and culture. The Korundi is a lovely contemporary art museum. Their civic buildings were designed by Finland's national architect, Alvro Aalto, and of all the Aalto buildings I saw during the trip they were my favorite.
And of course we drove up and walked around in the Arctic. The light at these latitudes is amazing, especially to a photographer. We only had one night scheduled in Rovaniemi, but we pushed it as far as we could on the second day; we hardly saw Luleå, our next stop, at all because we wanted to stay in Rovaniemi as long as we could. It touched both of our hearts, and we're anxious to go back. Next time we hope to spend more time above the Arctic Circle, and get to Rovaniemi from northern Norway.
This has been an entry in the 1001 Places to Remember project by @archisteem in collaboration with Architecture and City by @photocircle.