Sylvia's Journal

Turku hosts an annual medieval festival with 100s of people in period costume enacting various activities that presumably took place when Turku was an active trade port on the Baltic Sea. It was yet again a very hot day and I felt sorry for the actors in their outfits that looked a better fit for lower temperatures. Yet they were all very good natured and patiently explaining to people what they were doing. After seeing very few people during our first week in Finland we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of 180 thousand people who had all flocked to this highly anticipated annual event.

We have been eating seafood pretty much all the time, but when Axel saw the wild boar (or was it a pig?) on a spit, he couldn’t resist. The meat was served on a birchwood shingle. I continued with fish and got a birchwood plate with tiny small fry with garlic sauce. While we were eating the bishop came by (he looked very much like Sinterklaas) and the costumed people ran towards him and fell to their knees to receive his blessings.

We tried juniper and birch beer (no alcohol) and then the real artisanal beer that was brewed in a trough filled with hay, juniper branches and other naturals that worked as a filter. Because real beer was served the area was enclosed and a guard make sure no one escaped before their paper cup with beer was emptied. Some of the costumed people drank their beer from wooden tankards or horns.

All around the central square professional actors and volunteers in their period costumes demonstrated various artisanal occupations. There was a place for the children with traditional kids games and then there were the usual craft booths selling the kinds of things one sees at any craft fair in the US: woodcraft, leathers, jewelry, textiles, etc. The only thing we would probably not find at a fair back home would be the Minsk convent booth with its ornate carved boxes and combs. That’s when you realize that we are very far east.

After a bad night in our hot hut on the island the night before, the slow stroll along the booths-filled streets of Turku, and a quick tour through the museum with its remains of the old medieval town of Turku, had exhausted me. We plopped down at the banks of the Aura river at the Art café for a restorative cuppa.

For dinner Axel made open faced salmon sandwiches on a particular kind on the ubiquitous rye bread that a Finnish colleague of mine had recommended. For dessert I had made a rhubarb-strawberry compote. For the first time in days I collapsed while the sun was still fairly high on its downward arc (8:30PM). This meant that I woke up with the sun at 4 AM.

We are at the halfway point of our trip to Finland.