A friend of mine told me about one of the strangest villages in Finland. It was an extremely long one located by the sides of an almost straight road and continued for dozens of kilometers. The center of the village was 30-40 kilometers from the nearest towns.
It had been a rural village and like with all rural villages, people had started leaving. There was a lot to explore, my friend said.
And quite well enough I didn’t even get to the village, before I spotted the first location.
Looks like a very old farm house, which has been abandoned for ages. The roof looks surprisingly fresh, though.
After trekking through the jungle between the road and the porch I was greeted to this.
It was a two room cottage, which was very badly destroyed from the inside. By vandals or failed renovations, I don’t know.
Plain wood, torn wallpaper, bricks and debris was really all there was to see.
Some windows had been blocked even when the building was still in use.
This one was the larger room of the house.
The fireplaces were completely destroyed.
This is the other room. It was pretty much the same. As the floor was badly destroyed, I didn’t explore further.
Not the most interesting of places. But they all count!
Yet another familiar location. This is the small village store in the middle of nowhere featured earlier in 2022. As there is something looking like a camera next to the open door in the right corner of the building facing the road, I decided to approach from the back.
I tried and tried to find a weak spot in the vegetation, but there was also a deep trench somwhere underneath. And I was only wearing my short shorts.
And why was I only wearing short shorts? Well, my friend had told me that their friend owned the place and that they would like to see the expression of the owner, if I was caught on camera with my shorts.
The camera looking thing was still there on top of the grey box on the side wall. And I didn’t feel like posing. So I just left.
Having again read the news, I heard of a new elementary school built in a village, which former was a center of a small municipality. The building of the new school in such small places almost always means the demolition of the old school. And again I felt sorry about the beautiful old 1950’s school building.
The demolition was set to begin that summer. I figured out I could still make it before the bulldozer if I hurried. It was fifty-sixty. Especially because the work was delayed, as nests of the common swift were found in the attic, when the work started.
As you can see, it was too late.
Technically I could have still entered, as the demolition site was very poorly secured and the demolition workers were just leaving for the day. But as the demolition had already advanced this far and the building was that old, I figured out, that the asbestos removal work had already been done. That meant, that there was nothing to see inside.
A fairly strange way to operate carving small holes in different parts of the building. I guess they knew, what they were doing, though.
This side of the school was still intact. The new school can be seen behind it.
The style of the two wings is so different, you dould almost think that the school has been built in different phases. I couldn’t confirm this with the help of old maps or photos.
The gym wing has already lost its roof.
They did carry out the demolition before the end of the summer. So much for another interesting location.
This time I find myself by the old main road in a small regional town. My friend, who has tipped me about several locations in Finland was visiting her relatives in the area and told me about an old store, which sat abandoned.
The main building and storefront were clearly abandoned, but there might have still been something going on in the storage wing. There was a car workshop at the back of the yard. There was definitely still something going on.
Is that a bottle of ketchup on the table?
There’s been a gym in the building.
The last inhabitants.
There were probably apartments upstairs. At least there were mailboxes.
The front of the store. Not a very successful exploration this time.
You already know the story, as I’ve told it so many times. I travel a lot by train, and I mean a lot. Until the spring of 2023 I did it weekly, and I accumulated around 60 000 kilometers on the tracks yearly. After that the mileage dramatically decreased, as I stopped going to my former home town on a weekly basis.
I had travelled the route so many times, that knew it by heart. I could look out of the restaurant car window in the middle of the night while being completely wasted, and within a minute I could locate where we were. That’s why I also knew the abandoned houses on the railside by heart. And had already visited many of them, some more successfully than others.
This time my location was a small and unremarkable yellow cottage, which I had been looking at the past four years. Its windows were smashed, its door was open. I was almost certain, that nothing could stop me from gaining entry number 30 that year.
Except the excavator. The house had still been there a month ago, but I guess a lot can happen during summertime.
Moving on to the next location, which I have already previously documented. This time it’s about the railway station residential area, I photographed in 2022. Since then two houses have been demolished and several renovated, the one I managed to enter still stands empty.
Along with the one abandoned one still standing, which I didn’t manage to enter the previous time. And that was the one, which I was interested in.
Still standing. Somebody had now switched off (or more likely broken) the lamp on top of the door. Nothing else had changed, though, so I’m going to have to have come back.
Like to so many other places visited during this summer of disappointment.
The following yearly check up was to a former mental asylum, which I had discovered back in 2021. I visited again in 2022 only to find out, that the former staff apartments had found new inhabitants.
Since then it had been on the news, that the owner plans Airsoft games to be played in the old main hospital. As nothing new had really appeared, I decided to check it anyway.
The gardener has become a bit lazy since last year, but the place still was intact. As the inhabitants were on the yard, I decided not to go further.
I guessed at this point, that I would need to remove the location from my list, but for some reason didn’t. And that proved to become quite the story.
But as this is an exploration diary, we are not there yet.
It was another day in the life of an an urban explorer and it looks like it was beginning with freshly made eggs.
Just kidding. I was actually approaching another house, which I’ve seen through train windows. It was right next to a very small regional railway station, which closed decades ago. The village remained very small, and that’s why to my surprise, two older ladies illegaly crossed the rails. (It is illegal in Finland to cross rails in other than marked spots). One of them pointed out the eggs to me.
But before we got there, they were rather curious about me. So I showed them the house, and asked, if they knew anything about it. They said, that the godfather of one of them owned it years ago, but it had been empty for decades. A local entrepreneur had bought it it and had some plans for it, but they never materialized.
“Do you think he’ll mind if I’ll have a look”, I wondered.
“Let’s not tell him, so he’ll probably never even get to know”, the other one said. I considered this another green light.
There was the house, but now I was faced with my first problem. It had been abandoned for so long, that no road, whatsoever could longer be found. The yard was very overgrown and a deep trench ran between the house and the railway area.
Well, time to test my durability.
I was scratched by all kinds of plants, bitten by every imaginable insect and almost fell down one trench, but I made it.
Nobody had indeed lived here in ages. At least the interior looked like it.
A very old magazine. The theme is Christmas.
10 kg of cucumbers from the other side of Finland. This co-operative was merged with a larger one in 1980.
Another mystery. A bottle of cod liver oil from a pharmacy again hundreds of kilometers away. It looks like there is something left.
The corner of the room contained some old clothes.
The ceiling was already in such a condition, that support was needed.
Rust had recolored the ovens.
That’s all that’s left of the curtains.
Looks like an old pancake pan there, on the floor.
And all kinds of old kitchen stuff.
The headline from decades ago asks, how we are going to do in these times of economic changes. A valid question still all these decades later.
A newspaper from 1977. The appearance of the other papers looks about the same so I guess they are from the same era.
One of the few pieces of furniture left.
Oh, I take that back. It was all just stored here at the back.
I wonder, what has been read here.
An article explaining, why a postal code is needed. The national mail company was starting mechanical sorting. This wasn’t just yesterday.
The year was 1971.
A social guide? I wonder what that is.
The window overlooking the overgrown front yard with railway tracks in the background.
“God is love.” Well, I am in a fairly religious area.
A flower drawing by an unknown young artist.
And one final look at the primitive kitchen and the huge baking oven. There was even an upstairs, but the state of the ceiling didn’t make it worth a visit.
This time the effort was paid off. And every time I watch this building from the train windows, I feel satisfaction.
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