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July 20: Hugo Simberg and the viewtower

Started by going to the cathedral opposite our hostel, which turned out to be a good choice. Built in 1907, it's a sturdy-looking granite building, a bit more squat than you might expect a cathedral to be. The interior, painted by the artist Hugo Simberg, is riotously colourful compared with the minimalist white decor which a lot of Finnish churches go in for. Around the gallery stretches a huge mural of twelve nude boys, carrying, with some difficulty, a great green garland studded with rose-blooms and thorns. This, apparently, represents the twelve apostles bearing the Garland of Life. Coiled in the centre of the ceiling is a huge serpent with an apple in its jaws. The walls and pillars are heavily decorated, with two paintings on the eastern wall. One shows two boys carrying a wounded angel-girl through a barren landscape; the other depicts three strangely kind-looking black-clad skeletons, tending to fantastical plants in a garden. The altarpiece is the only painting not by Simberg, It's a strangely serene picture, in muted colours, of the Resurrection before the last judgement. Corpses rise from the ground, yawn, stretch, and join a a wan procession stretching across a bare plain.

Having been thoroughly impressed by the cathedral, we were delighted to discover that Tampere museum was holding an exhibition of Simberg's work. The exhibition took up the entire three floors of the museum, and included a lot of material on the decoration of the cathedral. Simberg (1873-1917) was a prominent figure in the National Romantic movement, and most of his pictures are grounded in Finnish rural life and folk mythology. The cheery skeletons we had seen in the church cropped up several times, conducting peasants to the gates of heaven and hell and dancing gaily with village women. Another recurrent figure is fattigfan (``poor-devil''), a kind of small, rustic demon who comes across by turns as frightening, mischievous and occasionally kind. One of the original sketches for the Wounded Angel picture we had seen in the church (probably Simberg's most famous painting) had the angel being carried by two of these demons.

After lunch we visited a spy museum on the edge of town³⁵, but after a morning of Simberg we couldn't muster much interest. Went back to the hostel to cook dinner³⁶ In the evening, we walked to a huge³⁷ viewtower on the edge of the lake. Spent the evening in the café at the top, eating ice cream, playing cards and watching the sun set.

Footnotes

... town³⁵

It was actually two museums: the basement housed a small but well-stocked handcuff museum.

... dinner³⁶

Potatoes, pickled herring and blueberry soup. Very Finnish.

... huge³⁷

Well, 124m. Finland's tallest, apparently.