In The Middle Of Nowhere Part I

There are certain abandoned buildings, which I call big locations or big catches. They are places, which I’ve tried to photograph for a long time, or find otherwise extremely interesting. They are often large, have lots to explore and have an interesting history. Being able to explore one of these big catches gives the sweetest feeling ever.

Typical big catches would be the leather factory, which I explored in August 2020 after watching it from train windows for almost ten years. Or the Teininkallio school, which I managed to explore just a month before demolition. This summer’s first big catch was of course the place where my nightmares were made, which I re-explored. But now I was heading towards my first new big catch of the year.

I found this location around a year earlier by accident on a Youtuber’s video. It was a large, beautiful 1950’s school, which was in an awful condition. I was in the area when I saw the video, and did my best to locate it while there. It ended up in failure. After months of detective work I finally managed to find the place. The more I studied, the stranger it got.

The school is located in a place, where you don’t end up by accident. It is 25 kilometers from the nearest town, far from highways, in a very, very small village, which back in the early 2000’s had around 30 inhabitants, now probably many less.

There’s nothing special about this. All the way until the 1970’s or even the 1990’s every village had their own school. What makes this school special is its size and materials. It is a 3-storey high brick building, not a small wooden one with two classrooms. The complex actually includes the school and a separate two storey high brick building, which served as teachers’ apartments.

To make things even stranger, the large school isn’t even located in the village. It is some 2 kilometers from there, and it’s not even located by a proper road. A narrow dirt path of some 500 meters leads to the middle of the forest from the dirt road running to the village.

According to a local urbexer’s long since dead website, the village never had more than 20 kids meaning, that the school was mostly empty. Yet it managed to stay in use until the late 1990’s. When the town decided, that enough was enough, eight pupils went on school strike. The story doesn’t tell, if there were more of them left.

After a year of detective work and this rather long prelude to a story, I am finally ready to enter my 100th location.

This is the road leading from the village’s main road to the school. It’s about 500 meters long.

The first glimpse of what awaits me: the teachers’ apartment building. We’ll save that for later.

There we have the school.

And there we have a stove, which someone has decided to throw out of the teachers’ apartment building.

The school I have been longing to find for so long. The whole building is not visible. There is another wing on the back side.

Every door and window was broken.

The boiler room.

As the location was remote and the pupils were few, no larger renovations were ever done. All materials are from the 1950’s.

I could either go left or right. Making the choise was a bit difficult.

So I decided to photograph a Corn Flakes box.

Eventually I went right finding the first classroom. The floor had been made of beautiful parquette, which was now in pieces.

There was a lot of furniture and paper in the first room.

The book is titled “Every Man’s Finnish History”.

This looks like the former kitchen. Behind the windows is a corridor to the other wing.

Definitely the kitchen. But what is that red thing on the floor?

A sauna stove. Well, this wouldn’t be the first school with a sauna I’ve explored.

A plastic bag with the logo of Anttila, a chain of department stores, which went bankrupt in 2016. That bag is older. They were like that in my childhood in the 1990’s.

This book is called “Paavo’s Time” in English. Paavo Väyrynen is a legendary Finnish politician, who was a member of parliament since the 1970’s and a minister in eight different governments on five different decades. It is claimed, that he said in the 1980’s that he is chosen by God himself to lead the Finnish people. He has tried to become president in 1988, 1994 and 2012 through the Centre Party and in 2018 as an independent candidate.

Once the honorary president of the Centre Party, he has largely become a political outcast, as his views haven’t changed the least bit since the 1980’s. He has since quit the party, founded two new parties and rejoined his original party.

So Paavo’s Time never came. He tried to run for the fifth time in the 2024 elections, but his campaign didn’t get the 20000 signatures needed for him to be eligible to run.