When the last ice age ended, some eleven thousand years ago, the enormous ice sheet covering Scandinavia began to retreat and the land that is now Finland was gradually uncovered. The first human groups arrived hard on the heels of the thaw: hunters and fishers following reindeer and herds across a tundra that was only just turning into forest. The Susiluola site (the "wolf cave"), in Ostrobothnia, sparked intense debate because some researchers proposed an occupation predating the last glaciation, but the dating is still disputed and most archaeologists take the postglacial settlement, around 9000 BC, as the safe starting point.
For millennia these peoples lived from hunting, fishing and gathering. Comb ceramic pottery in the Neolithic and, later, the spread of metalworking marked stages of contact with the rest of northern Europe. Farming arrived late and slowly, because the climate made it difficult: much of the country went on depending on hunting and on burning forest to sow (slash-and-burn) well into historical times.
In the far north a people with its own language and culture took shape: the Sami, traditionally called "Lapps", an exonym now avoided because of its pejorative weight. The Sami are the only Indigenous people recognised as such within the European Union. Their language belongs, like Finnish, to the Uralic family, but forms a separate branch. They lived from hunting wild reindeer, fishing and gathering, and over the centuries developed the reindeer herding that is still a mark of identity in Lapland. The border between the Sami world of the north and the Finnish farming world of the south runs through the entire history of the country.
From the 12th century onwards, the kingdom of Sweden extended its power and its faith eastward over Finnish lands, in a process that tradition wrapped up in the so-called "Swedish crusades". How much was organised military campaign and how much later legend is debated among historians, but the outcome is clear: by the 13th century Finland had been absorbed as the eastern part of the kingdom of Sweden, with the Roman Catholic Church as its backbone institution. Turku (Åbo in Swedish) became the main city, seat of the bishopric and administrative centre, and its cathedral, consecrated at the end of the 13th century, is still the mother church of the Finnish Lutheran Church.
As borderland, Finland was a recurring stage for the wars between Sweden and Russia (Novgorod first, then the tsardom of Moscow and the Russian Empire). The Treaty of Nöteborg in 1323 set a first dividing line; the following centuries moved it again and again by fire and blood.
The 16th century brought two deep changes. The Protestant Reformation converted the kingdom to Lutheranism, and with it came the man who founded written Finnish: Mikael Agricola, bishop of Turku, who translated the New Testament and fixed the spelling of the language for the first time. Swedish, however, remained for centuries the language of government, law, higher education and the upper classes, while Finnish stayed the language of the peasantry. That class-based linguistic divide would weigh enormously on the national awakening of the 19th century.
The period was no idyll. The "Great Wrath" (Isoviha), the Russian occupation during the Great Northern War at the start of the 18th century, left devastation, deportations and hunger. And the famine of 1695-1697, caused by years of frost-ruined harvests, killed an enormous share of the population through starvation and disease; the most widely accepted estimates say that between a quarter and a third of the inhabitants died, one of the worst demographic catastrophes in European history in relative terms.
In 1808-1809, in the context of the Napoleonic wars, Russia invaded Finland and took it from Sweden. Under the Treaty of Fredrikshamn (1809), the Swedish kingdom ceded its entire eastern half. But tsar Alexander I did not annex Finland as just another province: he constituted it as the Grand Duchy of Finland, an autonomous state of which he himself was Grand Duke. At the Diet of Porvoo, that same year, he undertook to respect the laws, the Lutheran religion and the privileges inherited from the Swedish era.
This autonomy proved decisive. Finland kept its own legal system, its administration, its Church and, in time, its own currency, the markka, created in 1860. In 1812 the capital moved from Turku to Helsinki, closer to Saint Petersburg and easier to control, and the new capital was rebuilt with the grand neoclassical architecture of Carl Ludvig Engel that still defines its centre. In 1827 a fire devastated Turku and hastened the move of the university to Helsinki.
For much of the 19th century Russian rule was relatively benign and allowed Finland to develop institutions that, almost without meaning to, turned it into a nation. Only at the end of the century, with the policy of Russification, would that autonomy fall into crisis and push Finns towards the idea of independence.
The Finnish 19th century is the century in which a peasant people with no state of its own built a national identity. The slogan that summed up the project is attributed to the philosopher and statesman Johan Vilhelm Snellman and his circle: "Swedes we are no longer, Russians we do not want to become, let us therefore be Finns". The Fennoman movement pushed Finnish out of the countryside and up into government, school and culture, in a struggle with the old Swedish-speaking elite.
The founding cultural event was the Kalevala. The country doctor Elias Lönnrot travelled Karelia for years collecting ancient Finnish oral poetry from the mouths of folk singers, and from that material he composed a national epic: the first version appeared in 1835 and the definitive, expanded one in 1849. The Kalevala gave Finland what other nations had had for centuries — an epic poem of its own, with heroes such as Väinämöinen — and it became proof that Finnish could carry high culture and not just the plough. Its influence was enormous, from the painting of Akseli Gallen-Kallela to the music of Jean Sibelius, whose work (Finlandia, the Karelia Suite) became the emotional anthem of nationalism.
Towards the end of the century, tsar Nicholas II launched the policy of Russification (the February Manifesto of 1899) to cut back Finnish autonomy: an attempt to impose Russian, subordinate the Finnish army and limit the Diet. The answer was mass civic resistance and a great petition signed by half a million people. In 1904 a Finnish civil servant, Eugen Schauman, assassinated the Russian governor-general Bobrikov and killed himself, an episode that marked the mood of the time. The pressure led to a historic reform: in 1906 Finland adopted a single-chamber parliament elected by universal suffrage, and it was the first country in the world to give women both the right to vote and the right to stand for election.
The collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 opened the door. After the Bolshevik October Revolution, the Finnish Parliament declared independence on 6 December 1917, the date that is now the national holiday. In January 1918 Lenin's government, busy with its own revolution, recognised the new state.
But independence arrived wrapped in a ferocious internal conflict. Society was deeply split between the "Reds" — working-class social democracy, based in the industrial cities of the south and supported by Bolshevik Russia — and the "Whites" — the conservative government and the property owners, backed by imperial Germany and militarily led by Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. Between January and May 1918 a short, bloody civil war broke out and the Whites won it.
The death toll is chilling for such a small country: around 36,000 to 39,000 people, the vast majority not on the battlefield but in the terror that followed. There was a Red terror and a White terror, but the deadlier one belonged to the victors: thousands of Reds were executed and some 80,000 were interned in prison camps where, in the spring and summer of 1918, between 12,000 and 13,000 people died of hunger and disease. The memory of that war — silenced for decades, dressed up by the winners with euphemisms such as "war of liberation" — divided Finnish society for generations, and only in the second half of the 20th century did historians confront it head-on. After a brief flirtation with installing a German prince as monarch, Germany's defeat in the First World War meant Finland finally organised itself as a republic, with its first Constitution in 1919.
In August 1939 the secret pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) placed Finland inside the Soviet sphere of influence. Stalin demanded territory and bases; Finland refused. On 30 November 1939 the USSR attacked without a formal declaration of war, and even installed a puppet government. The Winter War had begun.
What followed astonished the world. A small, poorly equipped Finnish army held out for more than three months against a vastly superior power, making the most of the terrain, the forests, the extreme cold and guerrilla tactics on skis. The Red Army, weakened by Stalin's purges, suffered enormous losses. Even so, the imbalance was unsustainable: under the Moscow Peace Treaty of March 1940, Finland kept its independence but ceded Karelia and other areas, close to 10% of its territory, and more than 400,000 Karelians were evacuated and resettled across the rest of the country.
Seeking to recover what it had lost, Finland aligned itself in practice with Nazi Germany and, in June 1941, when Hitler invaded the USSR, launched the Continuation War (1941-1944), retaking Karelia and pushing beyond the 1939 borders. This co-belligerence with Germany is the most uncomfortable page in Finnish history and it has to be said without euphemisms: although Finland kept its own command and did not adopt the Nazi race laws, it fought on the same side as the Third Reich. The government protected most of its few Jewish citizens, but handed over to the Gestapo a handful of Jewish refugees and Soviet prisoners of war, something Finland officially acknowledged decades later. When the war turned, Finland signed the Moscow armistice in September 1944 and had to drive the German troops out of the north by force: this was the Lapland War, in which the retreating Germans burned much of Lapland to the ground, Rovaniemi included. Finland lost close to 90,000 soldiers in these wars and was left with punishing reparations, but — uniquely among the USSR's neighbours — it was never occupied and never became communist.
Once the war was over, Finland was left in an extremely delicate geopolitical position: bordering the Soviet Union, forced to pay heavy reparations and to cede Karelia for good, but determined to preserve its democracy and its market economy. The strategy that defined those years is summed up in the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance signed with the USSR in 1948 and in the policy of president Juho Kusti Paasikivi and his successor Urho Kekkonen: a careful neutrality that avoided provoking Moscow in exchange for keeping internal independence.
In the West this was named, in a critical tone, "Finlandisation" (Finnlandisierung): a formally free country that adjusted its foreign policy — and sometimes its domestic policy, with self-censorship in the press and in publishing — so as not to irritate its Soviet neighbour. The term became pejorative and many Finns reject it because it flattens a more nuanced reality: thanks to that balancing act, Finland kept free elections, a private press, private property and freedoms that no country in the Soviet bloc had. Kekkonen governed as president for a quarter of a century (1956-1982), a personal hegemony that is also looked at critically today.
Finland knew how to make the most of its in-between position: it traded with both the USSR and the West, and in 1975 Helsinki hosted the conference that produced the Helsinki Final Act, a cornerstone of Cold War détente on security and human rights. That tightrope act — neither Soviet satellite nor NATO member — defined Finland throughout the Cold War.
In barely a few decades, Finland went from being a poor rural society to one of the most prosperous in the world. Postwar industrialisation, built on the timber and paper of its forests and later on metalworking and electronics, funded the construction of a Nordic-style welfare state: universal public health care and education, pensions, generous parental leave and a sharp reduction in inequality.
Education became the country's trademark. The comprehensive school reform of the 1970s — a free public school with no early selection exams and with highly trained, respected teachers — produced spectacular results: in the early 21st century Finland topped the international PISA rankings and became a model studied all over the world.
In the 1990s the country went through a brutal depression, made worse by the collapse of trade with the USSR, with unemployment climbing above 15%. Recovery came through technology. Nokia, an old company that had started out in paper and rubber boots, reinvented itself as a global mobile phone giant, and for years it was the largest handset maker on the planet and the heart of a tech boom that pulled Finland out of the crisis. Nokia's later fall in the face of smartphones, already in the 2010s, forced the economy to reinvent itself once again, this time towards video games (Rovio, Supercell), software and clean technologies. Finland joined the European Union in 1995 and adopted the euro from its birth in 1999-2002, the only Nordic country to do so.
Throughout the Cold War and the three decades that followed, military non-alignment was almost a dogma of Finnish identity. Even after joining the EU in 1995, Finland stayed out of NATO, betting on a strong national defence — it still has conscription and one of the largest artillery forces in Europe — and on good relations with Russia, with which it shares a border of more than 1,300 kilometres.
Everything changed on 24 February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine on a full scale. Finnish public opinion, which for years had mostly rejected NATO membership, swung abruptly: within a few weeks, support for joining the alliance became an overwhelming majority. Finland and Sweden applied together. After overcoming objections from Turkey and Hungary, Finland became a full member of NATO on 4 April 2023, at a stroke doubling the alliance's land border with Russia.
It was a historic turnaround: the country that had made neutrality and balance with Moscow the axis of its policy for eighty years abandoned that doctrine in a matter of months. In response, Russia announced it would reinforce its military presence on the border, and the bilateral relationship — including the border itself, which Finland largely closed at the end of 2023 over a migration crisis it attributed to a Russian manoeuvre — entered its tensest phase since the Cold War.
Present-day Finland combines, in a way visitors often find astonishing, prosperity, equality and an almost sacred relationship with nature. It has topped the UN World Happiness Report for years, has very high levels of social and institutional trust, low corruption and one of the smallest gender gaps in the world. In 2019 Sanna Marin became prime minister at 34, one of the youngest heads of government on the planet, leading a coalition headed by women.
The country remains deeply bilingual in law: Finnish and Swedish are both official languages, although Swedish is spoken today by around 5% of the population, concentrated on the coast and in Åland. Since 1996 the Sami of the north have had a Parliament of their own and recognised cultural and linguistic rights, though open claims remain over land, herding and full acknowledgement of the historical abuses of assimilation policy.
Everyday life revolves around things that have become symbols: the sauna (there are more saunas than cars), the "everyman's right" (jokamiehenoikeus) that allows you to walk, camp and pick berries in almost any forest, the hundreds of thousands of lakes and the summer cabins. This is a country that climbed out of poverty and out of the shadow of two empires to invent a model of its own, and that today watches its long border with Russia with the mix of calm and vigilance its whole history taught it.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Finland's inland lake country, and Karelia above all, is the country's mythical landscape. It was in the villages of Karelia that Elias Lönnrot collected, in the mid 19th century, the old sung oral poetry passed down through generations, and from it composed the Kalevala, the national epic published in 1835. That world of lakes, forests and singers gave Finland its founding imagery: painters such as Gallen-Kallela and composers such as Sibelius drew inspiration from these landscapes. Karelia is also a region split by history: much of eastern Karelia was ceded to the Soviet Union after the wars of 1939-1944, and hundreds of thousands of Karelians were evacuated into the rest of Finland, taking their dialect, their cooking and their memory with them.
Set between two lakes and on the Tammerkoski rapids, Tampere became in the 19th century Finland's great industrial city. The power of its rapids drove huge textile and paper mills — the largest was the Finlayson cotton mill, founded by a Scotsman — which drew in thousands of workers. That concentrated working class made Tampere a stronghold of the labour and socialist movement. In the civil war of 1918 it was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles: the city, in Red hands, fell to the Whites after brutal urban fighting, with thousands dead and taken prisoner. It was also in Tampere that Lenin and Stalin met for the first time, at a Bolshevik conference in 1905. With the decline of the textile industry, the city reinvented itself around technology, the university and culture, and today it markets itself as the sauna capital of the world.
Lake Saimaa is the largest in Finland and the fourth largest in Europe, an immense maze of islands, channels and forests that served for centuries as a transport route and a disputed frontier between Sweden and Russia. To guard that eastern border, the Swedes raised Olavinlinna castle in 1475, at Savonlinna, the best preserved medieval stone fortress in northern Europe, on an islet surrounded by water. It changed hands between Swedes and Russians several times. Since 1912 its courtyards have hosted the famous Savonlinna Opera Festival, one of the great cultural events of the Finnish summer. Saimaa is also home to a natural rarity: the Saimaa ringed seal, a critically endangered freshwater subspecies of which only a few hundred individuals remain.
The historical region of Savonia, with Kuopio at its centre, is the heart of the landscape of water and forest that defines the image of Finland. Kuopio, officially founded in 1775, grew as a regional capital and as the episcopal seat of the Finnish Orthodox Church, a tradition inherited from contact with the Russian and Karelian world. From the Puijo tower the view stretches out over a mosaic of lakes and islands. Savo cooking produced emblematic dishes such as kalakukko, a bread stuffed with fish, and local culture cultivates with humour its reputation for sly wit and speaking in riddles. Kuopio also boasts the largest public smoke sauna in the world, true to the central place of the sauna in Finnish life.
Above Lake Pielinen, in North Karelia, rise the hills of Koli, considered Finland's national landscape par excellence. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the country was looking for symbols for its identity, artists, writers and composers — Gallen-Kallela, Sibelius, Juhani Aho — climbed these summits and turned them into an emblem of national romanticism: the view of endless forest and water from the top of Ukko-Koli became almost a patriotic icon. Today the area is a national park and protects both the nature and that cultural memory. The region also keeps a strong Karelian and Orthodox heritage, with monasteries such as Valamo and Lintula resettled in Finland after the loss of eastern Karelia.
Northern Finland is part of Sápmi, the ancestral territory of the Sami people, the only Indigenous people recognised as such in the European Union. The Sami inhabited these lands long before there were borders between Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia, borders that now divide their territory. They lived from hunting wild reindeer, fishing and gathering, and developed the reindeer herding that is still central to their culture. They speak Sami languages, of the Uralic family but distinct from Finnish; three variants are spoken in Finland, all of them endangered. For generations they suffered assimilation policies — schools where their language was banned, religious pressure, marginalisation — whose full acknowledgement is still an open demand. Since 1996 the Finnish Sami have had a Parliament of their own and recognised cultural rights, though disputes over land and herding continue.
On the shore of the great Lake Inari — sacred to the Sami and scattered with islands, one of them a former place of worship — the village of Inari is the centre of Sami cultural life in Finland. It is home to the seat of the Sami Parliament and to the Siida museum, which brings together the history, nature and culture of the north. Three different Sami languages coexist in the area: Northern Sami, Inari Sami (spoken only here, and on the brink of extinction before a remarkable revitalisation effort with "language nests" for children) and Skolt Sami, brought by the Skolt community resettled after losing their land on the Soviet border in the wars. Inari is today the best place to approach, respectfully, a living culture rather than a tourist postcard.
When Finland signed the armistice with the Soviet Union in September 1944, one of the conditions was to expel the German troops stationed in the north. That set off the Lapland War (1944-1945), in which the former German ally became the enemy. Retreating towards Norway, the German army applied a scorched-earth policy and systematically destroyed villages, bridges and roads: Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, was left almost completely razed. Close to 100,000 people from the north had to be evacuated, many to Sweden. After the war, Rovaniemi was rebuilt to a plan by the architect Alvar Aalto, whose street layout recalls the outline of a reindeer's head. That destruction and rebirth are an essential part of the identity of modern Finnish Lapland.
In recent decades Lapland has reinvented itself as a world-famous winter destination. Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle, promotes itself as the official residence of Santa Claus, with a "village" that welcomes visitors from all over the planet and answers children's letters. Further north, resorts such as Levi and Saariselkä offer skiing, sledges pulled by huskies and reindeer, glass igloos to sleep under the sky and, above all, the chance to see the northern lights, visible on many clear winter nights. In summer, by contrast, the midnight sun rules, and does not set for weeks. This tourism transformed the northern economy, though it has also created tensions with Sami communities over the use of their image and of their herding lands.
Not all of the north is tundra: the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia has a history of its own tied to the sea and to trade. Oulu, the largest city in northern Finland, was founded by the Swedes in 1605 and prospered for centuries on the export of wood tar, essential for caulking the sailing ships of half of Europe; barrels of tar came down the rivers from inland to its port. After the decline of tar, Oulu reinvented itself in the 20th century as a university and technology hub, one of the centres of the Nokia boom and of telecommunications research. This whole northern coastal strip, Ostrobothnia, also has a strong rural and religious identity and was the cradle of Lutheran revival movements.
The southern coast is, literally, where Finland's history begins. During the Swedish era Turku (Åbo in Swedish) was the most important city in the territory: seat of the bishopric from the 13th century, of the government and of the first university, the Royal Academy of Åbo, founded in 1640. Its cathedral and its medieval castle are still the oldest and most revered monuments in the country. When Finland passed to Russia in 1809, Turku was the natural capital, but the tsar pushed it aside in favour of Helsinki, closer to Saint Petersburg. The final blow came with the great fire of 1827, which razed much of the wooden city and precipitated the move of the university to the new capital. Even so, Turku kept its pride as the mother city, and its river, the Aura, is still its backbone.
Helsinki was founded by the Swedes in 1550 as a commercial rival to Tallinn, but for centuries it was barely a village. Everything changed in 1812, when the tsar chose it as capital of the Grand Duchy. Russia wanted a capital on its own terms and commissioned the rebuilding to the architect Carl Ludvig Engel, who raised the neoclassical ensemble of Senate Square — the white cathedral, the government palace, the university — that is still the city's postcard. Helsinki grew as an administrative and then an industrial centre, and went from imperial provincial capital to capital of an independent country in 1917. In 1952 it hosted the Olympic Games, a symbol of the country's return to the world after the wars, and in 1975 it hosted the conference that produced the Cold War's Helsinki Final Act. Its architecture mixes Russian neoclassicism, the national romanticism of the early 20th century and the functionalist design that made Alvar Aalto world famous.
Facing Helsinki, on a string of islands, stands Suomenlinna (Sveaborg in Swedish), one of the largest sea fortresses in the world. The Swedes began building it in 1748 to hold back Russian expansion, a colossal undertaking for the time. Despite its size, it surrendered to the Russians in 1808 without much resistance, an episode still argued over, and it stayed in Russian hands throughout the Grand Duchy. It was a military base, was shelled during the Crimean War and, after independence, became a prison camp in the civil war of 1918. Today it is a Unesco World Heritage Site, an inhabited neighbourhood and one of the favourite outings of the capital's residents.
The southern coast is dotted with small historic wooden towns. Porvoo, on the banks of its river, is the country's second oldest city and preserves a medieval core of little red houses and riverside warehouses that were painted that colour, tradition says, to welcome Swedish royalty. It was in Porvoo that the Diet met in 1809 where tsar Alexander I swore to respect Finnish law, a founding moment of the autonomy. Naantali, near Turku, grew up around a medieval convent and over the centuries became a summer resort town: it is home to Kultaranta, the summer residence of the President of the Republic, and to the Moomin World theme park, a tribute to the characters created by the Swedish-speaking Finnish writer Tove Jansson.
The south and southwest coast is the heart of Swedish-speaking Finland. A good part of the Finland-Swedish minority — around 5% of the country's population — lives here, and many coastal towns keep Swedish as their majority, everyday language, with their own signs, schools and press. This dual identity comes from six hundred years of Swedish rule and is still alive at sea: the archipelago stretching out in front of Turku, a maze of thousands of islands and islets, formed for centuries a culture of fishers, sailors and island farmers. Boating, ferries and the archipelago route still define life on this coast, laid out like a natural bridge between Finland and Sweden.
The Åland Islands are an archipelago of thousands of islands and islets sitting right at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia, halfway between Finland and Sweden. That strategic position, at the entrance to the sea routes towards Stockholm and into the gulf, shaped their whole history. Like the rest of Finland, Åland was part of the kingdom of Sweden for centuries and passed to Russia in 1809. In the 19th century the Russians fortified the islands with the fortress of Bomarsund, which was destroyed by the British and French fleets during the Crimean War in 1854. As a result of that episode, in 1856 the powers imposed the demilitarisation of the islands, a status that — with nuances — holds to this day.
When Finland became independent in 1917, a problem erupted: the population of Åland was, and still is, Swedish-speaking and overwhelmingly in favour of joining Sweden rather than Finland. A petition signed by the great majority of the islanders asked for annexation to Sweden, and the two countries clashed over the islands. The conflict was taken to the newly created League of Nations, which issued a famous ruling in 1921: the islands would remain Finnish, but Finland had to guarantee them broad autonomy, protection of their Swedish language and culture, and demilitarisation and neutrality. It is one of the first major cases of a territorial conflict settled peacefully by an international body, and it is often cited as a rare success of the League of Nations.
As a result of that ruling, Åland today enjoys a remarkable degree of self-government within Finland. It has its own parliament (the Lagting) and government, legislates on many matters, and Swedish is its only official language: administration, school and daily life run in Swedish, and Finnish is not compulsory as it is in the rest of the country. The islands have their own flag, their own stamps and even their own regional internet domain. There is also a "right of domicile" (hembygdsrätt) that regulates who can buy land and vote in the islands, designed to protect the local character. When Finland joined the European Union in 1995, Åland did so with a special status, negotiated separately, which allows it for example to keep tax-free sales on the ferries, a pillar of its economy.
Åland's identity is inseparable from the sea. For centuries its inhabitants lived from fishing, seal hunting, maritime trade and shipbuilding. In the early 20th century the shipping company of captain Gustaf Erikson, based in the capital, Mariehamn, assembled one of the last great fleets of merchant sailing ships in the world — the big steel-hulled windjammers — which competed carrying grain from Australia when the rest of the world had already moved to steam. One of those vessels, the Pommern, is preserved as a floating museum in Mariehamn. Today the Åland economy combines that seafaring past with the ferries that cross the Baltic, boating tourism among thousands of islands and a strong sailing tradition.
Well into the 21st century, Åland remains a territory demilitarised and neutralised by international treaty: there can be no fortifications or troops on the islands, and its inhabitants are exempt from the conscription that applies in the rest of Finland. That status, inherited from 1856 and confirmed in 1921 and 1940, took on new relevance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Finland's entry into NATO in 2023: Åland's demilitarisation now sits, not without debate, alongside the country's membership of a military alliance. With only a few tens of thousands of inhabitants, the islands keep an identity of their own, between Finland and Sweden, that makes them one of the most singular corners of northern Europe.