Every Finn has two homes. The first always close to their working place where they spend most of their time. Most often an apartment in an urban area. While their second home is their kesämökki (or summer cottage) which must stand in the midst of the forest and close by a lake. As mökki (as it is often called) is a place off work, quite naturally, most spend as much time as they can afford there. It is at the mökki where they try to get away from their everyday routines. The essence of life at the summer cottage is not to do anything more significant than relaxing. And they are rather good at doing exactly this.

Almost every summer cottage is at first just a hut with a sauna; sauna is the most important thing. There is no mökki without the sauna, or to put it another way around, if the kesamökki does not have sauna it is simply not a kesämökki. And the sauna is used just like it was in the old days: it is the place for maintaining personal hygiene and as a source of hot water. While a nearby lake is used for getting the water for creating humidity in the hot room and as a place to cool off between the sauna sessions. Hours at a time are spent here.

Once sauna is in place only then gradually other facilities are developed nearby: a grill place for cooking, a dock for easier access to the lake and a small hut for sleeping. Whenever possible, these are never too close to one another, as Finns are people who do appreciate having a lot of space around them.

Although mökki is a place for relaxation, it is itself also a never-ending project as there is always something that is either in need of building, repairing or at least painting. However, most of the time spent at the mökki is used for nothing else but eating, drinking, sauna and resting.

The preparations for the visit to the summer cottage include an extensive shopping for groceries. Amounts of food and drinks consumed at the cottage are simply incredible. Thinking about spent time there quite often brings recollections no other but of eating and drinking from getting up until going to bed.

But as easy as it might seem, spending time at the mökki might not be that calming for the faint hearted. In the kesamökki there’s no electricity, no running water, no sewer, no nothing. Whereas these conditions don’t rise any brows around here, I cannot really imagine that a central European family could and in fact would choose to spend their holidays by candles in the dark, washing themselves in the lake and taking a dump behind a tree. Circumstances which Finns might not even regard as worth thinking about seem rather harsh even for their geographically close neighbors Swedes. (I don’t know where Russians stand on this.)

There’s another specialty of Finns’ summer cottages which is particularly dear to me. Mökit are real time capsules. No, they don’t bury anything. They are too practical for such stupidities. Mökki owners bring to their cottages all the stuff they don’t need anymore anywhere else (or didn’t want in the first place, such as are, for instance, ugly and useless gifts). Mökki hence becomes a living home decoration and fashion time capsule.

If you ever befriend a Finn and they invite you to their kesämökki, don’t even think about not accepting the invitation. If you happen to live in the city, mökki experience will most likely be the closest you’ll ever get to living like Grizzly Adams, ever.

Check out some new images in the gallery and enjoy your summer.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 11:10 am and is filed under Culture, Finland, Leisure. 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.