The warmth of the cold

Finland as a country is famous for sub-zero temperatures, but its people are the very opposite

On either side of the grand entrance to the Helsinki Central Railway Station stand two statues, each holding a spherical lamp that lights up at night. The railway station is not just a city landmark, where your train from the airport will leave you as you make your way into the city; it is also the starting point of the longest railway line in the world, the 9,200 km-long Trans-Siberian Railway—currently suspended due to the Ukraine War—which runs the 21-day journey from Helsinki, Finland, across Russia to Irkutsk in Siberia. Don’t get distracted,” says our Finnish guide as we stand with her in front of the station. Look at the expressions of the four statues in front of you. One is happy, the other is sad, the third is anxious, and the fourth is ecstatic. Since everyone says we Finnish have only one expression to express every emotion, these poker-faced statues encompass them all!”

Besides being a maker of bad jokes, our guide is also one opinionated lady. See the building opposite the railway station... the one with the rounded balcony on the second floor like a sausage around it?” she asks. We call it Helsinki’s ugliest building!”

The Helsinki Central Railway Station, we learn, was built in 1904, and its design was selected on the basis of a competition. Of the 21 entries received, the winning one belonged to architect Eliel Saarinen whose son Eero would go on to design the TWA flight centre in the 1960s, which is talked about till today as a building comparable to those by Zaha Hadid in today’s times!).

Eliel’s design of the station abandoned romanticism and nationalism for a practical, rational approach, which is significant because it paved the way for the Scandinavian design aesthetic as we know it today.