The Berkeley Guides:
Berkeley Guide to Europe:
Finland:
Helsinki
With one million residents in the city and its sprawling suburbs, Helsinki lays claim to one fifth of the total Finnish population. To the denizens of this cosmopolitan city, Helsinki is Finland. Magnificent neoclassical government buildings line the elegant Senate Square, while international businesspeople dodge the package tourists, and sleep-deprived university students hack away at laptops on the Esplanade's breezy patio bars. Finland is a modern techno-nation, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Helsinki, Scandinavia's second-largest port city.
Helsinki was born around 1550, when King Gustav I, ruler of the Swedish-Finnish empire, uprooted the then-humble market town from the muddy mouth of the Vantaa River and replanted it on the Gulf of Finland, in hopes of creating a bustling trade mecca. In 1812, after Russia annexed Finland, Czar Alexander I declared Helsinki the official new capital and called upon architect Carl Ludvig Engel to bestow the city with a more appropriate stately style. As a result, Helsinki has often been called the last European city to be built as art.
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