Northern Light (from The Tablet, 4 September 2005)

Ilomantsi in Finland, just a few miles from the border with Russia, is the most easterly town in the European Union. This is Karelia, where two cultures taper across each other with land and soundscapes almost as suggestive of Stravinsky as of Sibelius. Sixty thousand Finns are Orthodox Christians - their church has established status along with the Lutherans - and Karelia is where most of them live.

As I arrive in Ilomantsi, bells clamour noisily across lake and forest on the feast of Saint Elias, patron of the local parish, and a procession is forming at the church porch. Behind a cross-bearer from the Finnish army, children from the village carry icons from the sanctuary, while young conscript soldiers form a guard of honour for the clergy and the Bishop of Oulu, Metropolitan Panteleimon, who is there to preside over the celebrations or praasnikka. It reminds me of my Irish childhood, of pattern days and visits to holy wells, and of the Irish army dipping the national flag to the Blessed Sacrament at the Corpus Christi procession.

Several hundred people wait outside the church, young and old, many of the women wearing the cotton feresi, Karelian folk dress, today in festive red. In the ambiguous light of a northern summer – this close to the Arctic Circle it’s almost never dark at the time of year - the congregation walks in procession along a narrow track to Ilomantsi Lake. Priests and choir chant in polyphony, their voices rising and falling on the morning breeze. Then on a wooded slope, the people gather about, as the bishop stands at the lake’s edge and blesses the waters.



In what is often thought of as a secular culture this is a real surprise. While the scene is almost more Russian than Nordic, there have been Orthodox Christians in Finland for almost a thousand years. The tradition was strongest in the nineteenth century, when Russia was the governing power and the country became for a time part of the diocese of St Petersburg. But even then there was a distinctly Finnish dimension, with the liturgy celebrated in Finnish and the parish clergy required to know the language. The decisive break with Russian Orthodoxy came with the 1917 revolution and the achievement of Finnish independence. It was compounded after World War II when Finland lost much of Karelia to the Soviet Union. Most members of the Orthodox Church in Karelia were evacuated – as many as 70 per cent – and it lost nearly all its property. Monasteries in areas now occupied by the USSR were re-founded at new settlements in Finland.

When the monks and nuns fled west, they re-established themselves near the town of Heinävesi. The nuns at Lintula Convent have been there since 1946. The Russian-speaking founders have been succeeded by a new generation of Finnish sisters and the community is now 16 strong. Sister Christadoule first visited Lintula when she was a teenager, her sense of vocation awoken when she sheltered on a cold day in the Orthodox Cathedral in the city of Kuopio as Vespers were being sung. She came from a Lutheran background and her story is not unique. Of the four Finnish Orthodox bishops, Sr Christedoule told me, three were former Lutherans, two of them former Lutheran priests.

Sr Christadoule’s first steps were not easy “There were old Russian nuns and it was very hard for a Finnish girl to join the convent. Instead Archbishop Paul suggested that I go to Greece where I joined a religious order.” In Greece she studied classical philology and she has now translated many of the Orthodox spiritual classics from Ancient Greek to Finnish.

The nuns at Lintula survive economically by making liturgical candles (but only in summer – it’s impossible in the sub-zero winter temperatures). The ethos is decidedly Scandinavian. “There is more democracy than when most of the sisters were Russian”, Sister Christadoule told me, “the abbess does not give orders and we discuss things.” The sisters are strongly ecumenical: there have been exchange visits with Catholic convents (Finland’s 8000 Catholics live mostly in Helsinki and the southern Finnish cities), while next month a delegation from Lintula will travel to Grottaferrata in Italy, the Eastern rite monastery in union with Rome, for celebrations of its thousandth anniversary.

At nearby Valamo Monastery there is a community of twelve monks. Their predecessors were evacuated by the Finnish army at the start of World War II. Valamo prides itself on being a window on Orthodoxy for the Western world and it also has a culture of ecumenism (in 1998 it hosted the European Catholic Bishops’ Conference). As at Lintula, the community is now essentially Finnish – the last Russian monk died in 1983. One monk, Fr Vladimir, who is an iconographer, explained his community’s sense of an interrupted tradition. “Our problem is that we do not have an older generation that we can look to for example. I refer to us as ‘book monks’, that is to say that we reconstruct our tradition from the literature: we read the books, we do our best. Hopefully a generation will look to us in time saying that there is something about our witness that draws us to God. When that happens, Valamo will grow again.”

The implied pessimism may be overdone. The real crisis was in the 1970s when the monastery almost closed, but a decision to try to attract tourists has paid dividends. The monks now run a hotel, and adult education courses are on offer in Orthodox spirituality and icon painting. Valamo now attracts 150,000 tourists annually. “In one sense tourism was a very good choice, Father Vladimir explained. “We are witnessing so much to the world. I could not do what I now in a city. We’re a completely open monastery and people come here because they want to hear what we have to say.”



Valamo’s tourist mission is part of a wider strategy. The Finnish Orthodox Church helps to market Karelia to potential visitors; the primate of the Finnish Orthodox Church even adds a piece to camera to a promotional video. There are strong reasons for this. While Karelia is a region of great natural beauty, unemployment there is twenty percent, twice the national average. Young people are leaving, and the fall in population is dramatic (the equivalent of a village’s population is lost every year). For a church that values community, tourism has become a key part of its social mission and its concern for its young.

The tourist product is not for the mass-market, but is more nuanced, offering visitors an insight into Karelian folk and culture. Even a commercial enterprise, the Bomba Spa Hotel built by the town council of Nurmes, is a cultural project with an element of recovered memory. The hotel is a reconstruction of an old Karelian village, now lost to Russia. In the grounds one pathway is marked ‘The way of silence’. It leads to a tsasouna, or oratory, beside Lake Pielinen. Inside the door, as in every Orthodox Church here, there is an icon of Saints Sergei and Herman: Sergei was the monk sent from Greece in 1325 to evangelise the northern peoples and Herman the pagan priest whom Herman baptised and who became his partner in evangelism.

Finnish Orthodoxy is in relative terms small, but for historical reasons it is strongly recognised in the life of the nation. On some measures Finland is more religious than its Nordic neighbours, with more people baptised and married in church than in Sweden and Norway. Even in the cities there are signs of public religiosity. Every March in the regional capital Kuopio (as also in the capital Helsinki), there is a Passion play. The participants in this Via Dolorosa walk through snow and ice from the steps of the Lutheran Cathedral to the Bishop’s Square outside the Orthodox Cathedral of St Nicholas.

I went to Vespers there a few Saturdays ago, the same service with all its sensuality and richness that so intrigued the young Sister Christadoule. The make up of the congregation was a surprise. A young cantor led the choir of six people. There were families with children. I particularly remember one young woman wearing a t-shirt with jeans cut to her knees, her face a picture of absorption. Finnish Orthodoxy is making an appeal to the young and educated: the church is attracting a thousand new members a year.

In the Ireland in which I grew up it was second nature to map the landscape in terms of saints, monastic settlements, and stories of miracles. Perhaps this is why I was so moved by this remote corner of Christian Europe with a landscape similarly touched by sacramentality. Here too religion is not merely a private matter but an important marker of cultural identity. Karelia with its cultural sources in the sensibilities of East and West offers an exceptional perspective on Orthodox Christianity.