Qualla: National Museum of Finland

National Museum of Finland: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thermos at Finnish Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5. Three architects in their twenties drew up the design that became the National Museum of Finland. Eliel Saarinen, Hermann Gesellius, and Armas Lindgren had only just opened their joint office when they won the competition in 1902. They were building a national museum for a country that was not yet a country, a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire that would not declare independence until 1917, and they made it look like every Finnish medieval church and castle melted together: dark Finnish granite, a tall stone tower, dragon ornaments, owls and bears worked into the masonry. Construction ran from 1905 to 1910. The museum opened in 1916. A year later Finland was a country, and the building had been a kind of architectural prophecy.

Image: Thermos at Finnish Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 2.5

National Museum of Finland: National Romanticism in Stone

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Skorpion87 assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The National Romantic style did for Finnish architecture what Sibelius was doing for Finnish music: it took a culture under foreign rule and gave it monumental form. Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen looked at the medieval stone churches of Finland and the surviving wooden castles an...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Skorpion87 assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

National Museum of Finland: From Stone Age to the Present

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Velivieras, CC BY-SA 4.0. Inside, the museum walked visitors through Finnish history from the Stone Age forward, organized into prehistory, the Middle Ages, the Swedish Kingdom period, the Russian Empire era, and Finnish folk culture. The Elk's Head of Huittinen, an eight to nine thousand year old stone s...

Image: Velivieras | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Museum of Finland: Mesa Verde in Helsinki

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paju~commonswiki, CC BY-SA 3.0. One of the museum's strangest collections is Native American. In 1891 the Swedish-speaking Finn Gustaf Nordenskiöld, son of the Arctic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, traveled to Mesa Verde in Colorado and excavated the Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings. He was arrested by US ...

Image: Paju~commonswiki | CC BY-SA 3.0

National Museum of Finland: Methane in the Silver Room

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY 4.0. On January 23, 2006, an explosion ripped through the museum's Silver Room. Methane gas had leaked from a pipe under nearby Museokatu, seeped into the drainage system through a dried floor drain, and accumulated in a broom cupboard until a spark from the cleaning closet's power di...

Image: Unknown author | CC BY 4.0