Hietaniemi cemetery

Who is here

Older accounts mention "a major WWII general" without naming him, which is an odd way to treat the main reason people come.

• Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim — commander-in-chief in both wars against the Soviet Union and later President of Finland. He lies in the Heroes' Place, Sankariaukio, among the war graves rather than apart from them, which was his own wish and is the point of the arrangement.
• Alvar Aalto, in the old cemetery.
• Presidents — K. J. Ståhlberg, Lauri Kristian Relander, Risto Ryti, J. K. Paasikivi and Urho Kekkonen.
• Carl Ludvig Engel, the architect who gave central Helsinki its neoclassical centre — the cathedral, the Government Palace, the university. He designed the buildings around Senate Square; the plan of the square itself was Johan Albrekt Ehrenström's.
• Mika Waltari, whose novel The Egyptian was the Finnish book the English-speaking world actually read.

Artists' Hill

The part worth looking for, and the part older accounts leave out. Taiteilijanmäki, Artists' Hill, is a dedicated block of the old cemetery holding more than fifty Finnish artists and their husbands and wives. The first was the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, buried here in 1943; the designer Tapio Wirkkala, the composer Erik Bergman and Waltari are in the same block.

The parish union publishes downloadable maps of the cemetery, of the notable graves and of Artists' Hill specifically. Anyone coming to find particular graves should take one; the cemetery is large and the blocks are not intuitive.

Sibelius is not here

Worth saying plainly, because it is the commonest assumption about this place. Jean Sibelius and his wife Aino are buried in the garden at Ainola, their house beside Lake Tuusula at Järvenpää, half an hour or so north of the city — not at Hietaniemi. The official list of notable burials here contains a Christian Sibelius, a professor of psychiatry, which is probably how the error started.

How it is actually laid out

Older accounts describe three sections — Jewish, Muslim and Orthodox — and that is wrong in every part. The great majority of the people named above are in the Lutheran cemetery, which those accounts do not mention at all.

There are five sectors: the Old Cemetery, which originated in 1815; the New Cemetery, added in 1856; the Hietaniemi area proper, opened in 1931; the Urn Grove of 1949; and the small Cemetery of the Guard from 1833.

• The Jewish cemetery is within Hietaniemi, and is the only Jewish cemetery still in use in Finland. It opened in 1895 and was extended in the 1990s, and it holds war graves and a memorial to the Jewish soldiers who fell in 1939–1944. It is closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays, keeps its own hours, and men are required to cover their heads to enter.
• The Orthodox cemetery is a separate cemetery next door — the Lapinlahti Orthodox cemetery, with the Church of the Prophet Elijah on its ground, belonging to the Orthodox parish rather than to Hietaniemi. It has its own gates and its own hours.
• A Muslim section could not be confirmed from any source and is not asserted here.

The war graves, and the Finnish practice behind them

The Heroes' Cemetery here is the largest in Finland, with over sixteen hundred graves, and it commemorates several thousand fallen from Helsinki. It also holds the graves of over a hundred German war dead, which is the detail that explains the history older accounts garble.

The thing to understand is that Finland brought its dead home. The fallen were returned to their own parishes for burial, which is why almost every churchyard in the country has a plot of hero's graves, and why Hietaniemi's is large rather than national. Finland has no tomb of an unknown soldier in the sense other countries have one, and older accounts that place one here are mistaken.

Which war, and against whom

This is where older accounts go seriously wrong, and the correction is not a quibble. They describe "those who opposed the Nazis and the Soviets" in the Second World War, which gets Finland's war backwards for most of its length.

• The Winter War, 1939–40. Finland was attacked by the Soviet Union and fought it alone.
• The Continuation War, 1941–44. Finland fought the Soviet Union again, this time as a co-belligerent of Germany, with German troops in the country.
• The Lapland War, 1944–45. Having made peace with the Soviet Union, Finland was obliged to drive the German army out, and fought it across Lapland.

So the enemy changed sides in the middle. The German graves here are a consequence of the second war, and the fact that they are in the same cemetery as Mannerheim is the history rather than an anomaly in it.

The other date in older accounts to discard: the periods of Russian repression that Finns commemorate ran from 1899 to 1905 and 1908 to 1917, under Nicholas II. The Alexander of 1809 was Alexander I, who confirmed Finland's laws and religion and is the reason there is a statue of him on Senate Square.

The chapels

There are two, and older accounts fuse them into one sentence that contradicts itself.

• The old chapel, 1873, by Theodor Höijer, at the Mechelininkatu entrance.
• The new chapel, consecrated 1933, by Albert Nyberg, with a columbarium attached.

A separate crematorium chapel of 1925, by Bertel Liljeqvist, stands beside the Urn Grove. The porter's house at the gate, red brick of 1901, is now a waiting room for mourners.

Visiting

• Gates open daily, all year, from early morning until ten at night. No charge.
• Only maintenance vehicles may drive in.
• It is busy on public holidays, and very busy around All Saints' at the start of November, when thousands of candles are lit on the graves after dark. That is the one occasion when the cemetery is itself the thing to see, and it is worth planning a visit around.
• The cemetery runs no tours of its own and refers visitors to the city's licensed guides. Individual graves can be found through the parish union's online grave search.

It is a working cemetery and people are burying their dead in it. The right register is quiet.

The beach next door

Hietaranta — Hietsu — is immediately north-west, and is the best-known beach within walking distance of the centre. The city's own description is one of the most popular in Helsinki rather than the largest or the main one. Changing shelters, showers and dressing rooms; lifeguards only during the summer season, when water temperature and algae readings are published daily.

The approach is lit and asphalted but steep in places, with steps as well as a ramp, and there is no accessible parking immediately beside it.