Finland

Finland is a vast country in the far North, east of Scandinavia, between Sweden and Russia, on the Baltic Sea. A good third of it lies beyond the Arctic Circle: in the north, the sun does not set in summer and barely rises in winter. Only five and a half million people live in this huge land of forests and lakes, mostly in the south, around the capital, Helsinki: it is one of the least densely populated countries in Europe. Peaceful and prosperous, Finland has for several years topped the rankings of the world's happiest countries.

Finland is a country of water and forest: it is nicknamed "the land of a thousand lakes", but in fact it has nearly two hundred thousand, among coniferous forests covering three-quarters of the country. In the north lies Lapland, an Arctic land of reindeer, tundra, northern lights and the Sámi people. Along the coasts, thousands of islands dot the Baltic. Winter, long and dark, covers everything in snow and ice; summer is short and bright.

Settled since prehistoric times by peoples speaking Finno-Ugric languages, Finland was long part of the kingdom of Sweden, which left a deep mark on it, and in 1809 became an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire. It declared independence in 1917, in the wake of the Russian revolution. In the Winter War of 1939–1940, this small country held off a Soviet invasion and kept its independence. Neutral during the Cold War, it built one of the most prosperous and best-educated societies in the world, and joined NATO in 2023.

Finnish belongs not to the Indo-European family but to the Finno-Ugric one: its relatives are Estonian and, more distantly, Hungarian, and it is unrelated to the languages of its Swedish and Russian neighbours. It is rich in vowels and grammatical cases. A minority speaks Swedish, also an official language. The country is Lutheran by tradition but very secular; it keeps the memory of an old world of myths and nature spirits, told in the national epic, the Kalevala.

The sauna is at the centre of Finnish culture: found in almost every home, it is a place of relaxation and equality, from which people head out to plunge into cold water or snow. Finns have a strong bond with nature and silence: everyone has the right to roam freely through the forests and lakes and pick berries and mushrooms. There is also the music of Sibelius, clean-lined design, and sisu, a quiet stubbornness in the face of hardship. In Lapland, Rovaniemi calls itself the official home town of Santa Claus.