Helsinki through the ages

Before there was a town there was a trade. By the end of the Middle Ages the Helsinki region had become an important trading centre for wealthy peasants, priests and nobles, ranking after Vyborg and Pohja, with furs, wood, tar, fish and animals going out across the Baltic and salt and grain coming back. Much of that traffic ran to Reval, the Hanseatic city on the far shore of the Gulf of Finland, and the shipping route made the coast worth more than its scattering of villages suggested. Written chronicles from 1417 mention Koskela, the village by the rapids at the mouth of the River Vantaa where the town would be planted.

King Gustav I of Sweden founded Helsingfors there on 12 June 1550, explicitly as a rival to Reval and as a way of consolidating trade in southern Finland. Towns were not conjured out of nothing, so the king ordered the bourgeoisie of Porvoo, Raseborg, Rauma and Ulvila to move to the new site. The order did not achieve its intended effect. The bay proved too shallow to build a harbour in, and the king allowed the settlers to leave. When Sweden acquired north-eastern Estonia, Reval included, in 1561 during the Livonian War, the crown lost any reason to build up a competitor to a city it now owned, and Helsingfors was left a forgotten village for decades.

In 1640 Count Per Brahe the Younger, together with some descendants of the original settlers, shifted the centre of the town south to the Vironniemi peninsula by the sea, today's Kruununhaka, where Senate Square and the cathedral stand. The improved harbour still failed to attract traders. Through the second half of the seventeenth century the wooden town suffered regular fires, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century its population had fallen below 1,700. For a long stretch it was mainly a small administrative seat for the governors of Nyland and Tavastehus County, plagued by poverty, war and disease. The plague of 1710 killed the greater part of the inhabitants. Three years later, during the Great Northern War, the Russians took the town in May 1713 and the retreating Swedish administration set fire to parts of it. Even so the population recovered to around 3,000 by the opening of the nineteenth century.

Once Russia began asserting itself in the Baltic from the foundation of St Petersburg, the Swedish authorities decided the harbour mouth had to be held. Construction of the island fortress of Sveaborg (Viapori in Finnish, now Suomenlinna) began in 1748 on the islands at the entrance to the harbour, and the works did more for the town's standing than trade ever had.

The fortress did not do the job it was built for. During the Finnish War the Russians captured Helsingfors in March 1808 and besieged Sveaborg until it surrendered in May. About a quarter of the town was destroyed by fire in November of the same year. Finland passed from Swedish to Russian control in 1809 under the Treaty of Fredrikshamn, and was constituted as the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland.

On 8 April 1812 Emperor Alexander I moved the capital of Finland from Turku to Helsinki. The reasoning was political: Helsinki carried less Swedish influence than Turku, which faced Sweden across the Gulf of Bothnia, and it lay far closer to St Petersburg, which made a Finnish government seated there easier to control. Sveaborg made the new capital less vulnerable to attack from the sea.

The tsar then ordered the town rebuilt in neoclassical style as a modern capital along the lines of St Petersburg. Johan Albrecht Ehrenström's plan was set in motion in 1816 under the German-born architect Carl Ludvig Engel and turned on a single large urban square. The Government Palace went up on its east side in 1822, the Old Church and the Orthodox Holy Trinity Church in 1826, and Engels Teater, the town's first theatre, in 1827.

That same year the Great Fire of Turku destroyed the Royal Academy of Turku, then the country's only university, and it too was relocated to Helsinki, renamed the Imperial Alexander University in Finland after Alexander I and eventually becoming the University of Helsinki. Engel designed its main building, finished on the west side of Senate Square in 1832, and its library in 1844, now the National Library of Finland. The square was completed by the cathedral on its north side, built between 1830 and 1852 as the St Nicholas Church; it could not be begun until the old Ulrika Eleonora church on the site had been stripped of its altar and furnishings and demolished, and it was finished twelve years after Engel's death.

The first Helsinki railway station opened in 1862 with services to Hämeenlinna, and the railway and industrialisation together drove the city's growth through the rest of the century. The numbers are blunt: 4,070 inhabitants in 1810, 11,100 by 1830, 20,700 by 1850, 43,300 by 1880 and 93,600 by 1900. Helsinki became the economic and cultural centre of Finland in the process.

The people arriving from the countryside mostly spoke Finnish, and the city's language balance tipped with them. In 1890, with a population of 61,530, Finnish speakers overtook Swedish speakers to become the majority. By the early twentieth century Helsinki was already predominantly Finnish-speaking, with a large Swedish-speaking minority; from the 1890s a mixed Finnish-Swedish slang with German and Russian influences, stadin slangi, grew up among the city's children and young people.

The first ninety years of Russian rule had been good to the city, but in 1898 the tsar named the military officer Nikolay Bobrikov Governor-General of Finland, and the Russification of Finland began in 1899 under Nicholas II. Bobrikov's brief was to hasten that process and assimilate Finland more fully into the empire, by force if necessary, which made him extremely unpopular; in 1904 he was assassinated in the Government Palace in Helsinki by Eugen Schauman.

Finland took advantage of the Russian Revolution to obtain complete independence in 1917. The same social and political turmoil ran through Finland, and independence was followed immediately by a civil war of three and a half months between the socialist Reds and the conservative Whites and government. The signal to begin hostilities was a red lantern lit in the tower of the Helsinki Workers' Hall in Hakaniemi on 26 January 1918. Helsinki lay inside Red territory: the government left the city and reassembled in Vaasa, and the Finnish People's Delegation, the government of the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic, was established in Helsinki on 28 January 1918.

German soldiers, allied to the White Guard, took Helsinki back from the Reds on 13 April 1918. Atrocities were committed by both sides during the conflict, and after the fighting ended thousands of Red prisoners died in White detention at several locations, among them the Suomenlinna fortress.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 placed Finland in the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The Soviets attacked on 30 November 1939, opening the Winter War, and Helsinki was bombed immediately as the war began and several times more before it ended. After an unfavourable peace, Finland took the opportunity to become a co-belligerent with Nazi Germany, fighting the Continuation War against the Soviet Union alone. That brought further bombings of Helsinki between 1941 and 1944, the heaviest being three massive raids in February 1944.

Finland was required to pay reparations to the Soviet Union after the war. Even so, Helsinki hosted the Games of the XV Olympiad in 1952. From the end of the Second World War into the 1970s there was a mass movement of people out of the Finnish countryside into the cities, and Helsinki above all: between 1944 and 1969 the city's population nearly doubled, from 275,000 to 525,600. Finland's rapid urbanisation in the 1970s, late by European standards, tripled the population of the metropolitan area and strained its transport, and the Helsinki Metro was built and put into service in 1982, extending into Espoo in 2017 and again in 2022. Housing shortages from the 1960s pushed residents out to Espoo and Vantaa, whose populations rose ninefold and thirteenfold respectively between 1950 and 2009. The city was European Capital of Culture in 2000 and World Design Capital in 2012.

Helsinki is the capital of Finland and the seat of the Uusimaa region, with 694,392 inhabitants in the municipality and 1,623,283 in the wider region. It remains officially bilingual in Finnish and Swedish, though the Swedish speakers who once formed the majority now number 37,349, or 5.4 per cent. Twenty-one per cent of residents have an immigrant background, twice the national average, most of them born in the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Somalia, Iraq, China and Russia, and at least 160 languages are spoken in the city. The Helsinki Synagogue of 1906 in Kamppi serves a congregation of over 1,200 of Finland's 1,800 Jews. Regular sailings to Stockholm, Tallinn and St Petersburg began as far back as 1837; in 2017 the Port of Helsinki overtook Dover to become the busiest passenger port in the world by combined liner and cruise passengers.