Olavinlinna Castle

Olavinlinna — Sankt Olofsborg, St Olaf's Castle — was founded in 1475 by Erik Axelsson Tott, who moved to profit from the political turmoil that followed Ivan III's conquest of the Novgorod Republic. He sited the fortress on a rock island in the Kyrönsalmi strait, between the lakes Haukivesi and Pihlajavesi, deliberately laying claim to the Russian side of the border drawn by the Treaty of Nöteborg. The island was chosen because it was ringed entirely by water whose strong current kept the strait from freezing, and the surrounding network of lakes and waterways would impede any Russian offensive. Tott named the fortress for St Olaf, the Norwegian king honoured as the patron saint of knights.

A letter of Tott's from 1477 mentions foreign builders invited to the site, probably from Reval, where the city fortifications were then being extended; sixteen master masons came from that city to direct the work. The labour was supplied by local people, who paid their taxes in work and hauled stone and timber to the island. The Russians, insisting the castle stood on their side of the border, tried to disrupt the building, so timber outworks went up first and soldiers guarded the masons. What rose was the first Swedish castle equipped with thickset circular towers built to withstand cannon fire. The three-towered keep was completed in 1485, and the outer curtain walls with two further towers followed by 1495.

War came the year the curtain walls were finished. Before the fighting of 1495 the Russians had offered a peace of five to ten years — on condition that Olavinlinna be handed over. The defence fell to Pietari Kylliäinen, who held the castle with about 150 soldiers and peasants; the Russians attacked three times during the war and never took it.

The border stayed violent after the peace. In August 1499 Eric Bielke, governor of Vyborg, received alarming reports of fighting against Russian forces who held that Nyslott was rightfully theirs and were trying to move the border posts to bring the town within Russian territory. Of the thousand Russians who took part, only about 200 are said to have carried firearms — the rest fought with axes and sabres — and they were repulsed with heavy casualties. On 14 September 1504 Bielke signed a twenty-year truce, though a letter of 1509 still complained that 'the enemies of God and Christendom, the intransigent Russians' had ravaged Finland.

Gustav Vasa, king from 1523, ordered the castle repaired and improved: the keep's towers were raised, the walls strengthened, and a great new gun tower built in the bailey under Henrik von Cöllen, completed in 1565. After the Treaty of Stolbovo pushed Sweden's eastern border far to the east, Olavinlinna ceased to be a frontier fortress. Gustavus Adolphus, returning from Poland, visited in 1622 — the only king ever to do so. A brisk trade had meanwhile grown up under the castle's protection, and the town it spawned, Savonlinna, was chartered in 1639.

The castle was never captured by force, but its garrison twice accepted terms. In the Great Northern War it surrendered to the Russians on 28 July 1714, and the occupiers dismantled St Erik's Tower down to its two lowest storeys. Returned to Sweden by the peace of 1721, it capitulated a second time on 8 August 1743, and the Treaty of Åbo that ended that war ceded the castle and the whole region to Empress Elizabeth of Russia.

The Russians rebuilt Olavinlinna as a bastioned fortress in the late 18th century, and Alexander Suvorov personally inspected its rearmament — a new outer work was named the Suvorov bailey after him. In 1788 a walled water channel was added, because Finnish and Swedish sharpshooters besieging the castle could easily pick off the men sent to fetch water. In 1791 the Thick Tower blew up when its powder magazine exploded, and the Thick Bastion was built in its place. Finland's passage into the Russian Empire as a Grand Duchy in 1809 ended the castle's military purpose, though a garrison remained until 1847.

It then served as a remand prison from 1855 to 1861, and great fires in 1868 and 1869 consumed nearly all its original woodwork. Restoration as a historic monument began in the 1870s, with the 400th anniversary celebrated in 1875; a major restoration begun in 1961 set out to return the castle as near as possible to its original form. In 1912 Aino Ackté staged the first Savonlinna Opera Festival within its walls, and the festival has been held there every year since 1967.