Here’s another collecion of pointless sentences together.
“Rescue my guinea pig! Please”
“Yeah, Yo Man”
The biggest sentence on the blackboard is Swedish, and says that you can’t eat that much, while the old sign begs for silence.
In addition to the collection of birds featured in an earlier post, the school had a collection of eggs. But which one came first, the egg or the chicken?
This is yet another of the plain crazy sights in this school. A caravan of birds led by a duck, a skull and a turtle. One poor birdie has even lost its head.
This bird has been left behind – or is flying ahead towards freedom. Who knows.
The glass box now contains glass jars.
A close up on the poor, headless bird.
And one on the skull. Google tells me that was a horse. Do you agree?
A box on the floor contained eggs, which had survived whatever had happened here.
A jar on the window board contained something really gross and slimy. I mean what is that? And what purposes could it have possibly served in a school?
Quack!
On the fifth floor we found yet another small lobby built in the 50’s expansion, and another shower room.
The lobby also had a storage room for sports equipment.
So this is as high as it gets. We now start our journey down the stairs. The basement’s still left to explore. That I’ll leave to the final post from this building. Then you will also learn the fate of the place.
The journey through the school has been really interesting, and it has gotten more and more interesting the higher the stairs we have climbed. The lower floors were just full of stockpiled stuff or empty classrooms, but the upper ones are in a much more authentic shape. It’s almost as if schoolwork had stopped just yesterday.
Welcome to the chemistry class, where most of the stuff has been loaded out on tables and then left behind.
The floor was littered with tiny metallic balls. An experiment on magnetism gone wrong?
The backroom of the chemistry class contained more old stuff. The classroom really has been well equipped – in the 50’s.
I think I did say that nobody had broken into this school. No doors or windows were broken, but the bottle here suggests, that someone had found a way in. Or then it was used in teaching chemistry. I can still recall us being told to count in high school, how much pure alcohol a bottle of vodka contained. “This is all you need to learn on this course”, the teacher said. And yes, she asked us to calculate it again in the test.
Now playing: Alice Cooper – Poison.
The backroom was shared by the chemistry class and auditorium, which had also something to do with chemistry and / or physics lessons.
This one doesn’t need translation. And hasn’t gotten too old.
The label says H2SO4, which is sulfuric acid. It should be transparent, but this bottle seems contaminated – or the label is lying.
This beautiful origami seems a little misplaced here.
What is this? And how do you use it?
Another decorated trashcan. This one says: “The traffic ministry informs, that you may get lost in this bin”.
The horror of every high school pupil: the language studio. The equipment has been dismantled. They surely did not try to use these antiquities in another school?
So this is where they have been listening the decades old listening exams in Swedish we found in the teachers’ common room.
Another piece of wall art made by graduates from 1993. The ones who have drawn this in their late teens are now almost 50 years old.
Another spectacular mural.
These were once a mainstay of Finnish schools. Now they have become a rarity, and people are willing to pay huge sums for them.
In this class we can see the grim reality of the school’s digitalization. It’s no wonder there were so many floppy discs in the school, as the computers were this old. I think that one might still run Windows 3.1. It looks like someone’s been training to write with their toes.
In the neighbouring class the blackboard has been torn down just for the fun of it. It hasn’t landed very far.
This classroom had once served as a literature class. This poster is about war literature, and although it’s not said here, the quotes are from the Unknown Soldier.
A Lord of the Rings themed mural really was suitable for the literature class.
In this classroom we found these bright orange chairs. Once a very common sight in Finnish schools, they have disappeared since my childhood, as schools have been renovated and rebuilt.
Another interesting formation of school desks.
The amount of maps left here suggests, that this once was a geography class.
The back of the classroom featured newspaper cuttings from news items concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict, EU peacekeeping operations in Sudan and women’s rights in Africa. On top of it all was a school photo from 1973.
We’ve reached the top floor. The high school classes were here. The doors are still labeled with names of subjects, although I don’t think they were current information at the very end.
I have never really seen a high school or higher education building without an image of Che Guevara made by the students. His legend really lives on.
Another futuristic mural by the students. Nobody cared for the tables in this classroom, yet all the chairs had been taken away.
One more boring classroom, where “Jyrki don’t push” is written on the wall. Finns will understand this, others may not. After this room things started getting even more intersting.
The fourth floor corridor was pretty much like all the previous ones.
The long metal bars have been used to hang large charts to the front of the class. I hope the teacher was away, when they came down.
The blackboard had been removed, but was still in the class. A strange display had been built on top of school desks. I wonder, what that scene is all about.
The shock of the school closing was too much for this poor chair, who fainted.
One alphabet was not enough for this classroom. They needed two.
Another thing the pupils had been given the chance to leave their mark on, were the dustbins. Someone has given his or her schoolmates the chance to cheat in the German verb test with this one.
Welcome to the former arts class. This classroom and its backroom were largely empty, but did contain some memories from better days.
I’m not sure, how this was done. I’m not sure even if it was complete. But it certainly was a good fit in this strange, empty gallery room.
The backroom was far more interesting. Not all the coffee machines in this school had found their way to the first room. My question is, how much coffee did they actually drink in this place?
These look healthy. The transparent liquid was used to preserve the surface of coal and chalk paintings, the brown bottle is nitric acid used at least in metal etching. The bottles are very old, as the company manufacturing the transparent liquids changed name after a takeover in 1992.
The backroom housed another set of slides. I don’t know if this is from the art lesson or the sex education lesson.
Can you spot the differences?
Why these were in the art class was another mystery to me. Perhaps they were used as materials for assignments, as there were not many current laws left in those anymore in 2005.
Imagine finding this bakery box and expecting a treat – and finding broken and disfigured ceramic statues.
Is it just me, or is the pupil art getting more spectacular the higher up we get?
A wall full of aphorisms. Lovely.
The expansion built in the 50’s featured two more floors on top of the two original gymnasiums. They contained a third gymnasium and two new lobbies. And this set of stairs, which was pretty airy.
The rules for using the school’s premises.
The stairs next to the gymnasium door led to this strange low room with a staircase.
And the staircase led to the showers.
The floor is original from the 50’s, I guess. The bathroom of my former apartment had a similar one.
The window in the shower room. They had the best views in town. This really should have been a sauna.
The third gymnasium. Here, too, someone has dismantled a part of the wall bars.
The door at the back of the hall led to this small storage space.
We could have easily taken a volleyball match. There were two balls and a net left.
A view back. The light coming from the windows beautifully aligns with the door. The small door on the left also leads to the showers.
Apparently a circus school has trained here. The instructions tell them not to leave money or other valuables in the locker room, as there have been thieves.
So much for the third gymnasium. In the next post we’ll explore the fourth floor a bit more.
After the teachers’ common room we found some more wall art. Wonder why unicorns and rainbows always go together.
This one looked like another classroom, but judging by the furniture it was rather a student union’s hangaround place.
This paper might explain, why the school was abandoned. It’s a wellbeing survey, and the pupil tells, she’s not enjoying the school. She says that the school building is in a bad shape and asks for the lessons to be held in the lower floors of the building, as the air conditioning is so bad on the upper floors. She also wants more parties.
Her arguments were pretty valid. We started our exploration trip before noon, when the sun was still going up. We reached the upper floors in the early afternoon. It was hot and it was difficult to breathe. A three hour stay in the building gave me a cough, an aching throat and thick, bitter slime started filling my sinuses. The building wasn’t healthy.
This floor contained classrooms on the left side of the corridor and offices on the right side.
Someone had reduced the school’s computers to scrap.
In this classroom they had apparently taught programming.
The high school principal’s presige has taken a hit.
This is one of the craziest installations I have ever seen in an abandoned building. A swan has been placed on a chair in a cleaning closet. Someone has written “lower class pupils smell” on the floor. And the sheet of paper on the door reads as follows:
“The cleaning department of the town of Hamina has decided to standardize the color coding of cleaning cloths.
Yellow cloth: toilet seats Red cloth or brush: wash basins of showers and toilets Blue cloth: tables and other layers Green cloth: wash basins and layers in kitchen.”
Dear sir. I accidentally used the green cloth in the toilet. So sorry. Please do not fire me. I mean, what the hell?
Someone has put in the effort to pile all but one of the school tables in the back of the classroom.
I just don’t get the logic. Why put everything there?
This painting was made two years before the school closed. It seems that the pupils were allowed to paint the walls long before they decided to close the school down.
Another lobby, another bird collection, another gymnasium. In the next post we’ll explore the top floors.
Next we found the teachers’ common room. Here they had removed almost nothing. All the stuff left behind was still there.
At this point we realized, that even a high school had been in the same building. The bunch of papers on the floor includes application instructions to universities, the Finnish army’s newspaper, a telephone catalogue and loads of other stuff.
I bet that the people who had left this mess behind had spent their decade-long careers complaining to pupils about the mess inside their school desks.
The teachers’ lockers. On the building history report of the school I read, that those had been original and built in the 30’s. They had lasted all these years.
Modern electronics never reached this school. They were still using overhead projectors and apparently slide projectors, too. These were from the art history lesson.
Those tapes look interesting. But what on earth was Microsoft Works? Everybody knows it doesn’t work 😉
Oh, it wasn’t that interesting at all. A 20 part series on historical Finnish authors. Poor pupils.
Now this surely was pure torture for everyone. All the matriculation examination listening exams on Swedish from 1985 to 1989. And some language teachers actually used these still in the mid 2000’s, when I was in high school.
Schools really didn’t have advanced technology in mid 2000’s. I remember our high school biology class getting the first video projector in 2007, and this school closed down in 2005. Floppy disks and cassettes were pretty outdated, though, even by my standards.
It seems some of the teachers didn’t even bother to pick up their mail in a while.
Now this is beautiful, sad and nostalgic at the same time. The remnants of the last coffee the teachers had back in 2005.
At the back of the teachers’ common room we return to normal. Most of the things have been taken away, some have just randomly been left.
In the back of the room were also the blueprints to the brand new school where the pupils and teachers were due to move.
Hamina is a strong city of Finnish baseball. But I never knew the school had their own baseball kits, too. When we had to play this, our own t-shirts were good enough.
The main stairway, like the one at the end of the building, was decorated with pupil made murals.
We entered the first classroom and were disappointed. This one was exactly like all the previous ones. There was only more stuff left here than downstairs. Then we exited, and managed to have a look back towards the direction we came from.
There was a large glass cabinet with the school’s collection of stuffed birds left behind. Showcases like this were in every old school in Finland back in the days, but they have now largely vanished.
Like the case with almost everything in this building, some of the birds had been removed and taken somewhere. These poor ones were left behind.
This is one of the three gymnasiums in the school. It’s so sad they don’t build stages like that anymore.
The side rooms next to the stage contained sports equipment and a speaker’s podium.
My former school had stairs like this leading to the stage, too. It was always so super exciting to be there, as it really was out of bounds for us.
Yet again the same old story. Someone had started dismantling the wall bars, then decided it was not worth it and just left everything as it was.
The entrance to the gymnasium was through this wide door, which seemed to have fallen slightly out of place. Note the stairs trying to eat the poor pillar.
One of the few broken things in the school was this mysterious hole in the wall. My only explanation would be, that they had taken some samples from the walls to determine the future life (or death sentence) of the building.
In my previous post we explored a rather boring ground floor of an abandoned school. This time it’s time to start ascending the stairs.
There were large pupil made murals in the staircase. They were all very well done and quite spectacular.
The first floor corridor was emptier, yet darker than the one on the ground floor.
The classrooms were all pretty similar and had their blackboards removed. Most of the stuff had been taken away, but every here and there there was something left behind.
Once again same, same but different. The walls were previously green, but have been painted over at some point. Why some classrooms had escaped painting, is unclear.
Old Finnish schools are always full of these. Usually they show flowers, trees or mushroom, this one shows, how something functions. What that something is, is a completely different question.
This classroom was slightly different and smaller than the others.
Once again: same, same. But different.
Here they had taken the blackboard away , but left the model letters on the walls.
The first floor lobby. Whatever has been on the wall isn’t there anymore.
A view from the first floor lobby to the school yard taken from above the main entrance. The yard seemed like a really boring place.
Time to explore the next floor. And I can promise you: the higher up we get, the more interesting this gets.
After returning home I did some more research on the school I had spotted on my adventures. It was designed in the 1930’s by the same architect who had drawn the houses in Lättälä, Väinö Vähäkallio, and expanded in the 1950’s. It had once been the main school of the town, but was closed down six years earlier because of indoor air problems. It had been empty since then.
The town was wondering what to do with the building. It was designed by a famous architect and a landmark with a rich history in the small town. Yet its expansion had caused it to lose lose some of its architectural value, it was in a bad shape and the town really had no use for it.
I didn’t know how the town officials would react to urban explorers, but the only way to get inside the school was to contact them. I called the official responsible for the town’s buildings expecting a strict ban on entering. To my surprise he said yes, agreed to drop the keys to the front desk of the town hall and said I could have them for as long as I liked, as they didn’t need them anymore.
I called the friend who had been with me in the planing mill the previous spring and she gladly accepted my invitation to join me. And off to Hamina we went again.
The keys were at the town hall front desk. I didn’t only get a single key, I got all the keys to this building. As far as I know, there weren’t any break ins or vandalism and the school was never accessible for random people. That’s why I believe we are one of the very few urban explorers, who had the chance to document this building since its abandonment.
This school pretty much began, where the old village abattoir ended. We started from the ground floor, where the old classrooms were filled with all kinds of miscellaneous stuff like a huge scale.
Unlike in the old abattoir, most of the stuff in this school could actually be explained. It is not very uncommon for people travelling to sports tournaments or other events where a large number of kids is present, to sleep in school classes. I believe the mattresses were here because of that.
A part of the stuff was apparently destined to get a new life elsewhere. The shelves are badged to a nursing home for old people, the strange white machine has another school’s name on it. The strange thing is, this school was also closed down in 2005, the same year as the school we are in now, and so the stuff apparently was never transferred.
Apparently all the coffee machines of the school have gathered here to speculate on their future.
What was really spectacular about this school was, that a lot of the classrooms, halls and stairways had pupil made art on the walls.
The unknown artists of the happy jumping dolphin have signed their work. Who they were and what became of them – no idea.
Around half of the room was inaccessible because of chairs and tables. Is the whole school just gonna be a massive storage facility, we asked ourselves.
This had probably been the school canteen. The doorway was also decorated by the pupils. The doorway was also probably added to the school later on, as its shape and size were totally different from what we found elsewhere.
Another classroom used as storage space. All the furniture is a funny mix of different eras and styles.
The ground floor corridor was very dark and also full of stuff. The doors upstairs lead to one of three gymnasiums.
Some of the ground floor classrooms were a lot emptier than the first ones we encountered.
They had removed the blackboards from most of the classrooms.
I just love these 80’s style curtains.
Here we have the school canteen. The people who had decided what to toss and what to keep were really inconsistent. Some of the kitchen appliances have been removed, some have just been left in their place. And this was the case with almost everything in this school. You could find very random stuff in very random places.
The kitchen backroom. Here they had gone so far that they had removed the cupboard doors, which sit neatly in one corner.
Most of the small stuff had been cleaned away on the first floor. The cleaners had missed this list, though. It’s about how national holidays affected working hours in 2005.
Another classroom filled with randomness from different eras.
This probably was an important part of the handwork lessons when the school was built. Does somebody still know how to use a spinning wheel these days?
This end of the school was built in the 50’s expansion. They demolished the old staircase, extended the corridor and built two classrooms more to each floor. They also added one floor on the gym wing so the school now had three (!) gymnasiums.
Some classrooms featured small backrooms. The window is straight to the marketplace, so the location of the school was really, really central.
I once again take my chance to wonder the logic of the people, who cleaned up this place. Why are these chairs left here and not with all the other chairs in one of the classrooms? And why has everything else been taken down from the notice board apart from that one sheet of paper?
Another almost empty classroom. The canister on the window board has contained soap.
And in this little backroom we have a futuristic rug, a throne looking chair and an old typewriter.
I wonder if a little bit of cleaning and a new tape would have restored his working order.
Some more art by the pupils. I wonder if nature has been a theme or if they have chosen their subjects themselves.
Another item left behind: instructions on Finnish grammar.
It was pretty evident from everything that renovations had been neglected for a long time.
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