Helsinki, like numbers of other cities, has two major cathedrals—no big surprise. But what is surprising is that both—one Lutheran and one Orthodox— were built on orders of the Russian Tsar Nicholas I, and paid for out of the same purse.
Nicholas I, Tsar of Russia and first Grand Duke of Finland
When the process started, in the early 1800s, the Swedish provinces we know as Finland had just been taken by Russia in a side effect of the Napoleonic wars. Russia declared the new lands to be the Grand Duchy of Finland, and the Tsar added the title of Grand Duke.
And, in a major shift, Russia made the small fishing village of Helsinki the capital of Finland, throwing resources into building up fortifications and extending the city, even populating it by forcing the entire populations of a number of other places to migrate.
The new city needed some serious buildings and institutions to match its new status, and on a hill just above the port, the Tsar arranged for a new civic center around a large open square. On one side, the University, relocated from the city of Turku. Facing it, the Senate House or government center. Between them, and up the hill, was chosen for the new Lutheran cathedral.
A short walk away, on another hill, a site was chosen for an Orthodox cathedral, built on the self-fulfilling prediction that Helsinki’s Russian population would grow. To finance both, the Tsar set aside 15% of the salt tax collected in Finnish ports.
The Lutheran cathedral, also called St Nicholas Church, was first, built starting in 1830 and finishing in 1852; it was designed by the German architect Karl Ludwig Engel, who also designed the square, but the four corner towers were added after his death.
Three distinctive statues stand in the corners of the church’s center, honoring Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, leading theologians of the Reformation, and Mikael Agricola, a Finnish reformer and a promoter of the Finnish language both for religion and literature.
Tsar Nicholas II visits the cathedral, around 1913
A Russian architect, Alexei Gomostayev, was selected for the Orthodox cathedral, which was built between 1862 and 1868. It wasn’t wholly funded by the salt tax, since part of that had gone to build a previous Orthodox church that turned out to be too small. One cost-saver in the building of the new church, called the Uspensky Cathedral, was 700,000 bricks barged over from the Bomarsund Fortress demolished in the recently-ended Crimean War.
Interior views of the Uspensky cathedral above are borrowed from other sources, since at the time of my visit, interior picture-taking wasn’t allowed; a shame, because this is only a sample of the beautiful decorations.
