The cathedral burned in 2006
This is the thing a current account of Porvoo must say, and it is the thing older accounts get precisely backwards. They state that the cathedral was bombed in the Second World War and came through without major damage — which leaves a reader believing the building has stood untouched since the fifteenth century.
On 29 May 2006 the cathedral was set on fire deliberately. The outer roof collapsed and was destroyed. An eighteen-year-old man was convicted of the arson and sentenced to several years' imprisonment. The one piece of good fortune was that the fire stayed above the vault: the inner ceiling and the interior survived. The cathedral was restored and reopened on 2 July 2008.
So the roof is new, the walls are old, and the building a visitor photographs is a restoration of twenty years ago rather than an untouched survival. That is a better story than the one it replaces.
The cathedral itself
The oldest parts go back to the thirteenth century, but the church as it stands is substantially of the fifteenth: the first stone walls between about 1410 and 1420, extended around 1450. The grey stone, the stepped gables and the separate bell tower on the slope are the standard Finnish medieval pattern, done well.
It became a cathedral in 1723, when the diocese of Viipuri was moved here after Viipuri itself was lost to Russia — a piece of administrative fallout that gave a small town a bishop.
Two things give it weight beyond its size.
- The Diet of Porvoo opened here on 28 March 1809. Alexander I came in person, confirmed Finland's laws, its Lutheran religion and the privileges of its estates, and Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy rather than a conquered province. Finnish statehood is generally dated from that meeting, in this building. Older accounts have this and are right to.
- It gave its name to the Porvoo Communion, the agreement that brought the Church of England and the other Anglican churches of Britain and Ireland into communion with the Lutheran churches of the Nordic and Baltic countries, with the commemorative eucharist celebrated in this cathedral. For a British visitor it is a more direct connection to the place than anything else in the town.
Visiting hours are longer in summer than in winter, and it closes to visitors for services.
The red shore houses, and a story to leave out
The warehouses along the Porvoonjoki are wooden storehouses, most of them built in the 1760s, where ships coming up the river from the sea loaded and unloaded and merchants kept their goods. One of them housed the town's customs in the late nineteenth century. They now hold restaurants, shops and places to stay, and they are painted in red ochre, the traditional Nordic paint made with iron oxide.
Why they are red is not actually known, and the popular explanation should be treated with suspicion: the tale that they were painted for a visit by Gustav III of Sweden appears in travel writing and nowhere authoritative. Red ochre was the cheap, durable, universal paint for Nordic timber buildings, which is a duller answer and more likely to be the right one. Older accounts assert the royal version as fact; it is not one.
The old town is not medieval
The street plan is — a tangle of lanes climbing from the river to the cathedral, which is why the place feels old. The buildings mostly are not. Porvoo burned in 1760, and the wooden houses standing now are largely of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, put up after the fire.
Older accounts describe the old town as restored to resemble its appearance in the Middle Ages. It was not restored to look like anything; it simply survived, and that is the more interesting fact, since very few Finnish wooden towns did.
Second oldest, third oldest
Porvoo is habitually called Finland's second-oldest town, and the claim needs one qualification. It rests on a traditional founding date of 1347, which the town itself uses. By surviving town charters the order is Turku in 1229, Ulvila in 1365, and Porvoo at about 1380, which makes it third. Both statements are defensible; "one of the oldest towns in Finland" avoids the argument.
Runeberg
Johan Ludvig Runeberg is Finland's national poet — not its former national poet, as older accounts have it; he has not been replaced. He lived in Porvoo from 1837 until his death in 1877, and his house has been a museum since 1882, which makes it the oldest house museum in Finland. It is kept as a prosperous burgher's home of the 1860s, which is as much the attraction as the poet.
The same museum looks after the Walter Runeberg Sculpture Collection. Walter was his son, and he is the sculptor of the Runeberg statue in the middle of Helsinki's Esplanade — so father and son turn up at both ends of the same day out.
Porvoo Museum, founded in 1896 and one of the oldest museums in the country, occupies historic buildings on the Town Hall Square. It opens Wednesday to Sunday, and its shop is currently being rebuilt.
Getting there — and not by train
There is no passenger rail service to Porvoo. Scheduled trains stopped in 1981 and freight in 1990, and Porvoo is now the largest municipality in Finland with no scheduled rail service at all. Any account suggesting a train is wrong; a new line east has been discussed for years and is not built.
- The bus is the way, and it is easy: frequent coaches from Helsinki take a little over an hour, run by several operators on numbered routes, some express and some by way of the villages.
- In summer there is a boat, and it is the best approach. The MS J. L. Runeberg, built in 1912, sails from Helsinki down the coast and up the river to the shore houses, several days a week from May to September. It takes most of the day there and back and the timetable is worth checking against the current season rather than any printed one.
- A heritage railway association keeps the old line towards Kerava, and has run steam and 1950s railbuses on summer weekends. Whether it is operating in any given year could not be established, so it is worth contacting them rather than counting on it.
Just outside the old town runs the course of the King's Road, the Kungsvägen — the medieval post route from Bergen through Stockholm and Turku to Vyborg and on towards Saint Petersburg. Older accounts mention a road to Saint Petersburg without naming it; this is the one, and it is the reason the town is where it is.