June 22
Today is Juhannus, the Midsummer Holiday. The day Finns tap into their pagan roots by eating sausages and lighting bonfires.
An artist from Chicago named Laura invites me to a Juhannus party up in Tampere, a college town a couple hours north of Helsinki. We catch the morning train with Laura’s Finnish friend Juho.
During the trip, Juho tells me about Finnish manhood. It’s experiencing a crisis, he says. For a long time, maybe forever, Finnish men were expected to be stern and stoic. Never talk about your feelings, never show emotion, etc. Some people say this is the reason behind a series of horrific family killings, eight of them in the past year alone. The killings all follow the same plot line: dad comes home from work one day and shoots his entire family then speeds off in the family minivan and crashes head-on into a tractor-trailer.
Juho says that when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90’s, Finland’s economy went into a tailspin. Back then, the country was infamous for its high suicide rate. Unemployed Finnish guys would drink themselves to death or shoot themselves with a hunting rifle in the privacy of their sauna baths. But now things have gotten much more grisly. Finnish men who want to end it all prefer an exit strategy that is less Ingmar Bergman and more Quentin Tarantino.
When we get to Tampere, Juho, who went to college here, leads the way. We take a bus from the train station up a big hill, then we walk down a million flights of steep wooden steps into Pispala, which is Tampere’s bohemian district, sandwiched between Lake Pyhäjärvi and Lake Näsijärvi.
A bunch of people are gathered on the shore of Lake Pyhäjärvi for the summer festival. There are food booths and jugglers and a sauna tent, a canvas army tent with a wood burning stove inside.
“What’s that?” I ask Juho.
“A sauna tent,” he says.
“Wow,” I say, because I’ve never seen a sauna tent before. I snap a bunch of photos of the thing while Juho stands by patiently.
“This seems so… Finnish,” I say to Juho.
“Mm,” he replies.
I find out later that not only are sauna tents a thing, but so are sauna rafts. A guy named Mikko tells me about them. He explains that the rafts are motorized, and they putter around Lake Pyhäjärvi discharging waste water full of soap and shampoo and whatever other waste products are discharged by a sauna raft. Of all the ways we’re killing the planet, this one is new to me: sauna raft pollution.
Mikko is an anarchist. Pispala is full of anarchists, it turns out. Mikko offers to give Juho and me a tour of Hirvitalo, the local anarchist squat. With its steep gables and timber accent trusses, the place looks a little like Villa Villekulla, Pippi Longstocking’s house. Inside, there’s an art gallery, a zine library, a silkscreen printer, and a music recording studio in the basement. It all seems idyllic, like some anarchist fairy tale house, till Mikko mentions the skinheads. Some Nazi skins attacked Hirvitalo a few months ago. They broke windows and pepper sprayed the anarchists who were there. Mikko shows us one of the flyers they left behind. The Nazis have updated their branding, replacing the old swastika with a flashy zigzag that could pass for the logo of a global shipping company or an athletic shoe.
“The Italians are behind that,” Mikko explains. “Italian Nazis have the best graphic design skills.”
Nazi skinheads are making a comeback in Finland. And not just Finland. They’re flaring up all over Europe. Like an old virus that can be treated but never cured. The herpes sore of European history.
i have finnish friends whom i've never had the chance of seeing in person. but you capture their stand-offish kindness so well. i recently interviewed a friend for an ethnographic essay, Matti, and i had never heard him talk so much in one sitting.