Tech bytes for tea?

We’d just gotten off the ferry from Helsinki to the off-shore sea fortress of Suomenlinna. While the excited tourists and local families with children hustled and bustled around the pier, I spied this old couple quietly cycling away from the hullabaloo into the tranquility of the island’s interior.

An old couple cycles slowly down a gravel path on a hot summer’s day on the fortress island of Suomenlinna in Helsinki, Finland. Both photos taken with a Nikon D600 with AF-S NIKKOR 24-120mm f/4G ED VR lens. Photo credit: John Tan.

Suomenlinna actually comprises eight islands, five of which are connected by bridges and sandbars. There are about 850 inhabitants on the island, while 400-500 people work there.

With a total area of 80 hectares, Suomenlinna is just off the coast of Helsinki and a short ferry ride away.

It is something of an equivalent of Sentosa for Singapore – having served as an off-shore sea fortress and now a convenient and pleasant getaway for locals living in the city over the weekend.

Construction for the maritime fortress began in the mid-18th century.

Locals and tourists clamouring all over an old cannon – one of many on Suomenlinna.

Finland had been under Swedish rule for some seven hundred years. The Swedish crown had intended Suomenlinna to serve as a bastion against Russian expansionism at that time.

The irony was that the newly completed fortress surrendered to the Russians towards the end of the Finnish War in 1808, before Russia occupied Finland in 1809.

In a sense, Suomenlinna was the raison d’être for Helsinki as it only grew substantially from the initial settlement to support the construction of the fortress.

Tags: Finland, Finland 2013, Helsinki, NIKKOR, Nikon, photography, photos, potd, Suomenlinna, travel, vacation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 14th, 2013 at 12:01 am and is filed under Finland 2013, Holiday, NIKKOR, Nikon, Photography, Photos, POTD, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.