“Welcome to the darkness”: things I learned about rural Finland and the people who live there

When I arrived in Sysmä, Finland, two months ago, my friend Janne welcomed me to the darkness. He probably knows — apart from a year in Southampton, where we carried out an extensive zythological study together, he has been living in rural Finland all his life. And yes, autumn is very dark here. On the winter solstice, dawn only came after nine o’clock in the morning. Just after three in the afternoon, it was pitch-dark again. The sun never climbed much higher than the horizon, gifting photographers a permanent golden hour. That’s when the colours of rural Finland are at its most beautiful: the birch forest covered with a layer of powdered sugar, the golden wheat fields, the shimmering water of the lakes, whether frozen over or not.

Here are four things I learned about that paradise:

1. It is quiet in rural Finland. Very quiet.

Not that I expected a bustling metropolis, but Sysmä is so dead that I sometimes believe that it’s a ghost town. Any moment you expect to see a tumbleweed roll by. There are very few people living here (and, mind you, this is the ‘busy’ south) and no people on the streets at all.

Occasionally, you spot a loner with a dog, or a badass granny zipping by on a cross between a walker and a scooter. If you see two people (most of the time in a jogging suit and with those silly Nordic walking sticks), then you have to suppress the tendency to approach them and congratulate them. They have friends, a social life. Three or more is a congregation. The closest Sysmä gets to gang formation are the teenagers who gulp down energy drinks in the entrance of the supermarkets. I saw many people gathering for the first time a month into our residency, not coincidentally on a Sunday at the church.

It is no wonder that you only see children, teenagers and people older than forty in Sysmä. Everyone between twenty and forty has left the countryside to look for work and fun in the cities. Social life does not go into high gear. We’ve entered Sysmä’s famous beach terrace only once, when a fishing championship made it exceptionally open its doors. Other than that, the owner only opens in the summer.

The coffee bar closes at three o’clock in the afternoon on Saturdays, the bus station bar at five o’clock and the alcohol shop and hamburger shack at six o’clock. You can’t really paint the town red. (Except, apparently, in the bar of the only hotel in town where, according to our Finnish housemate, the piña colada flowed freely and the karaoke went in overdrive. Did I mention that Finns love karaoke? They do, at least when they’ve downed enough drinks. Yes, that contrasts with 2 and 4, but hey, nobody said that life was black and white. Not even in the darkness of rural Finland.)

2. Finns are damn straightforward

They say what they mean and love to name their stores after a letter: K-market, S-market, R-kioski, ABC Gas station, and so on. Most Finns, and certainly those who live in the countryside, have no talent for small talk. The Finn, remarked the German Bertolt Brecht, manages to be ‘silent in two languages’, a reference to Finland’s two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. If you get into a car with a Finn and he remains silent for hours, that does not necessarily mean that he hates you. On the contrary, he probably feels quite at ease.

The only person who spontaneously started talking to me in those two months was a Jehovah’s Witness. During a guitarist’s performance we attended in the church, the concert-goers were afraid of applauding, terrified of standing out and anxious to disturb the order. The guitarist in question could also not be suspected of having an inflammatory personality. Only during the encores did he address the audience for the first time. With a remark about the weather. Hm, chit-chat after all.

Another example of the Finnish national psyche came to us when we watched the film Drifting Cloud by the country’s most famous director, Aki Kaurismäki. The main character sits on the proverbial emotional roller coaster. First, she and her husband both lose their jobs and they end up in poverty. Then she starts a successful restaurant. But her facial expression does not change throughout the film. She puffs from her cigarette as listlessly when her husband has just wasted their last 8000 marks in a casino as when she cannot keep up with restaurant bookings.

3. The sauna is the cornerstone of society

I once vowed to set foot on all 17,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Until I discovered that, at a rate of one a day, I’d need 54 years to accomplish that feat. Impossible. I had a similar feeling when I read how many saunas Finland has, an estimated three million. That’s impressive, even without the knowledge that this country has only 5,4 million inhabitants.

I should have known. Even in a Laotian village called Don Det, I once saw a sauna made out of plastic, built by a Finn who wanted to celebrate an ice hockey victory by drinking large amounts of beer in a sauna. That’s how crazy Finns are about sauna. And ice hockey. And beer.

Some claim that the sauna holds Finnish society together because it eliminates social differences. A bricklayer and a notary sit side by side in their birthday suits. The funny thing is that the personal space in which Finns feel comfortable is usually very large. They feel upset when someone wants to give them a kiss on the cheek. Sitting stark-naked in a sweat den together, on the other hand, is completely a-okay.

The sauna is an important source of national pride. A sauna that is not warm enough is what the Finns call a Swedish sauna. After their neighbours, those half-baked pansies.

For years, the town of Heinola, 50 kilometres from Sysmä, organised the World Sauna Championships. In 2010, a Finn and a Russian were the last remaining ones to be puffing and sweating at a temperature of 110°C. Timo Kaukonen, five-time world champion, and his Russian rival, Vladimir Ladyzhenski, refused to give up. Until it got too hot for both gentlemen and they fainted. Ladyzhenski died from third-degree burns. He had used painkillers and ointments to last longer. Kaukonen was rushed to the hospital, survives and got the affectionate nickname Sauna Timo. The general feeling afterwards: maybe it wasn’t the soundest idea to make a sport out of people sitting in a roasting oven. But above all, people felt happy that their Timo hadn’t given in against a damn Russian.

4. Gambling addiction is no problem, as long as you don’t drink

Until recently, I had no idea that such a thing as non-alcoholic mulled wine existed. It is many times more omnipresent than the regular mulled wine, with alcohol, which reinforces the inner being on Christmas markets in my regions. Even when the municipality of Sysmä organised a Christmas trail, on the blasphemously early date of December 1, we could only get our hands on heated-up grape juice. Because, according to my Finnish housemate, children were present. “And they should not be exposed to alcohol.”

Finns are weird when it comes to alcohol. They’ve experienced a prohibition and alcohol remains a sensitive topic. Only Alko, the state liquor store, can sell alcoholic drinks stronger than 4.7 per cent¹ . Admittedly, I have not seen any alcoholics here. A least, not the ones you see sometimes in Estonia, hanging around the supermarkets and patiently collecting cans and bottle to buy their two-litre bottle of Walter with the collected deposit. Not that Finns are teetotallers, far from it. Janne told me how students sometimes gulp down fermented fruit juice. There is also a reason why ferries between Helsinki and Tallinn were called booze cruises². And then there’s sahti, the Finnish farmer’s beer that you brew at home and that’s strong enough to put an elephant into a coma.

The addiction par excellence, however, is gambling. Slot machines are everywhere in rural Finland — in coffee bars, supermarkets, newsagents, and hamburger shacks. There’s always someone playing. It almost seems like a social obligation. Because ten per cent of the proceeds from the slot machines go to social security, many Finns think they are contributing to the good cause. And so you see grannies push coins in these pension-devouring machines, with their grandchildren under their skirts. Lottery tickets were also in high demand on the Christmas trail. Don’t panic, children, addiction is okay as long as you help your fellow man.

¹Janne pointed out that the government has since raised the alcohol level to 5,5 per cent. “Some raved that people are going to die now”, he said.

²Ever since the Estonian former health minister Jevgeni Ossinovski jacked up the excise duty on alcohol, Finns looking to get drunk cheaply had to travel all the way to Latvia, although the tax has since been lowered again.

We stayed in Sysmä, rural Finland, in November and December 2016 during a writing residency, awarded by Finnish literary organisation Nuoren Voiman Liitto. This article was first published in Dutch on Tom’s blog.