History of Helsinki

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Helsinki was founded by Swedish King Gustav Vasa in 1550 as the Swedish town of Helsingfors. Gustav intended for the town to serve the purpose of consolidating trade in the southern part of Finland and providing a competitor to Reval (today: Tallinn), a nearby Hanseatic League city which dominated local trade at the time. In order to ensure the economic viability of the city, the King ordered the citizens of several other towns to relocate to Helsingfors, but the order does not seem to have achieved its intended effect. The Swedish acquisition of northeastern Estonia, including Reval, at the conclusion of the Livonian War, caused the Swedish crown to lose interest in building up a competitor to Reval, and Helsingfors languished as a forgotten village for decades thereafter.

In 1640, Helsingfors was moved from its original location at the mouth of the river Vanda (in Finnish: Vantaa), but the improved harbour failed to attract traders. It was fortified by Swedish authorities after Sweden's defeat in the Great Northern War in 1721. After Helsingfors was temporarily occupied by Russian forces twice in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Swedish army constructed the sea-fortress of Sveaborg (today also Suomenlinna) to protect the city from further attacks.

When sovereignty over Finland was transferred from Sweden to Russia in 1809, the Russian government decided to relocate the Finnish capital from Åbo (in Finnish: Turku) - an ethnically Swedish capital on the edge of the Baltic Sea - to Helsingfors. It was believed that the relative lack of Swedish influence in Helsingfors, combined with its relative closeness to St. Petersburg, would make a Finnish government headquartered there easier to control; and the fortress of Sveaborg made the city less vulnerable to foreign attack. The Russian authorities rebuilt the city, intending to turn it into a stylish modern capital along the lines of St. Petersburg.

During the nineteenth century, Helsingfors became the economic and cultural center of Finland. Beginning from the late 19th century, Finnish language became more and more dominant in the city, since the people, who moved to the city were mostly Finnish-speaking. In the beginning of the 20th century the city was already predominantly Finnish-speaking city of Helsinki, although with a large Swedish-speaking majority. The population of the city grew rapidly after relocating the capital there, as demonstrated by the following table.