Mökki Escape

"Pirkkalan kesää", summer in Pirkkala.

Almost every family has a summer cottage in Finland. After the Finno-Russian war even the working class could afford to buy a piece of land and build their own cottages where their children and grandchildren are now enjoying peaceful moments in the summer time. It's a cliché but the Finns really like their own peace. Some people might know their countryside neighbours but the relations remain discreet, we don't want to bother our neighbours and, most importantly, we don't want to be bothered by them. Indeed, somebody rowing closer than 200 metres from our beach is considered as an intruder. My Grandmother bought our summer cottage (=mökki) by the 7th biggest lake of Finland in the 1970s and I have continued spending my summer holidays there since I was born.

Before leaving Finland in August, I wanted to go see my Grandmother's old summer cottage in Pirkkala, 10 km away from my hometown Tampere. It was a house built for her father in the late 1920s and my Grandmother had sold it in the 1970s when she wanted to have a house with own beach instead. I had always heard stories about the house and I had a clear image of it in my mind, I had also seen some old black and white photos of it that make it look like the most idyllic place on earth, just like in the old Finnish films. We took the old route to the summer cottage. We passed by an old industrial area where the first Finnish Coca-Cola company among others had operated. At one point, the road was closed but otherwise I got a pretty good idea of the road my Dad used to bike between Tampere and the summer house.

The grass had grown long and wild but the sauna still looked fantastic.

When we arrived, the first thing I saw was the old sauna and garage. Still in perfect shape even though they hadn't been in use after the property was sold some 40 years ago. The garden was getting pretty wild and I saw my Dad getting a bit nostalgic: "This used to be our badminton yard." Now you could mostly see a place to use scythe, but there was also great charm still very present. The house was exactly as I had imagined, beautiful white wooden house that I would have been ready to buy immediately if they hadn't built a row of houses just 20 metres away on my family's old land, what a shame. It has been there useless and most probably it will be demolished in the near future. My Dad had painted the roof in 1969; it was a punishment for bad behaviour my Mother told me (they had met a year earlier in Germany so also my Mom knew the place), while my Dad said it was for a lack of summer job that he had done it. "A difficult job." But it still looked almost freshly painted.

This is just like my dream house. Look at the beautiful windows! In the attic there should still be hidden an old rifle my Grandoncle had brought with him from the war in the 1940s.

The noise from the new road reached us in the feral garden. The house of an old neighbour had also been left unoccupied recently. It was all somehow very very sad. Even if I didn't have any direct contact with the place, I felt something had been lost.

Old photos from my Grandmother's photo album. In the corner, the house is photographed in 1928.