🇫🇮 Finland · South and coast
Turku is the oldest city in Finland and, for centuries, it was its capital: this was the country's religious, political and cultural centre when Finland was part of the kingdom of Sweden. That history is in the air around its two great medieval monuments, Turku Castle, next to the harbour, and the imposing cathedral, the nation's spiritual heart, both raised in the 13th century. Walking through Turku means looking into the very origins of Finland.
But Turku is not only the past. It is a young, creative university city, crossed by the Aura river, whose banks are the city's great open-air living room: promenades, terraces, moored restaurant boats, museums and nightlife. It was European Capital of Culture in 2011 and keeps a vibrant art and food scene, with markets, breweries and a close relationship with the sea and the archipelago.
Gateway to the largest archipelago in Europe — thousands of islands spreading towards Åland and Sweden — and to coastal Naantali with its Moomin World, Turku combines medieval history, a student atmosphere and Baltic nature. This guide covers the essentials of the old Finnish capital: what to see, how to get there and get around with Föli, what it costs and how to enjoy it in any season.
Turku is the oldest city in Finland: it developed in the 13th century around a port and the episcopal seat, and its cathedral, consecrated in 1300, became the country's religious heart. Through the centuries of Swedish rule it was Finland's de facto capital and its main centre: the country's first university, the Royal Academy of Åbo, was founded here in 1640. Everything changed after the Russian annexation: in 1812 the capital moved to Helsinki, and in 1827 a devastating fire — the largest in Nordic history — destroyed almost the whole city, which was rebuilt on a new street plan. Turku kept its castle, its cathedral and its role as the great city of the southwest. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Baltic coastal strip where the country was born: the old capital Turku, modern Helsinki and the wooden towns of a bilingual, seafaring Finland.
Read the history of South and coast →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Turku is, literally, the city where the urban history of Finland begins. Its very name says so: 'Turku' comes from an old word of Slavic origin meaning 'market' or 'trading place', while its Swedish name, Åbo, refers to the settlement by the river ('å' is river, 'bo' dwelling). At a ford on the Aura river, near the sea, there had long been a place of exchange, and there, in the 13th century, the country's first true city developed.
The decisive push came from the Church and the Swedish crown. After the Swedish crusades that brought Finland into the kingdom of Sweden and into Western Christianity, an episcopal see was established for the new province. Turku Cathedral, the heart of that bishopric, was consecrated in 1300 and became the most important church in Finland, a symbol of Christianity in the country. The city grew around it, with its square, its market and its wooden houses.
At almost the same time, around 1280, the Swedes began raising Turku Castle at the mouth of the river, a fortress to control the region militarily and to guard access to the Baltic Sea. With the cathedral as its religious centre and the castle as its centre of power, Turku settled in as the de facto capital of Finland within the kingdom of Sweden: this was where the bishop lived and, often, the governor or duke who administered the territory in the king's name.
Through the centuries of Swedish rule, Turku was the most important city in Finland and its capital in everything but name. It was the largest population centre, the administrative, commercial and religious hub, and the main point of contact with Stockholm, the capital of the realm, across the sea. Turku Castle was the stage of political and courtly life: in the 16th century, duke Johan (the future king John III of Sweden) and his Polish wife, Catherine Jagiellon, kept a Renaissance court of some splendour there, until dynastic struggles landed them in prison.
The Protestant Reformation reached Turku in the 16th century and had an enormously important Finnish protagonist: Mikael Agricola, bishop of Turku, considered the father of the written Finnish language. Agricola translated the New Testament into Finnish and published the first books in the language, laying the foundations of literary Finnish. Turku Cathedral became Lutheran and remained the country's spiritual heart.
The great cultural leap came in 1640, when the Royal Academy of Åbo, Finland's first university, was founded in Turku on the initiative of queen Christina of Sweden and governor Per Brahe. The university made Turku the country's intellectual centre and trained the Finnish elites for almost two centuries. The city, with its cathedral, its castle and its academy, was the undisputed heart of Finland.
Turku's fortunes turned upside down at the start of the 19th century. In 1809, after the Finnish War, Sweden ceded Finland to Russia, and the country became the Grand Duchy of Finland under the tsar. At first Turku remained the capital and the seat of the institutions. But its position, in the far southwest and facing Sweden, was awkward for the new Russian rulers: it was too far from Saint Petersburg, the imperial capital.
In 1812, tsar Alexander I decided to move Finland's capital to Helsinki, much closer to Russia and protected by the Sveaborg fortress. It was a hard blow for Turku, which lost its historic role as the country's centre. The bleeding was completed a few years later: in 1827, after the great fire, the university also moved to Helsinki, leaving the old capital without its great cultural institution.
In barely two decades, Turku went from being the capital of Finland to a large provincial city. It did not, however, lose its importance: it remained the main centre of the southwest, an active port towards Sweden and a commercial and industrial hub. And it kept what made it unique: its castle, its cathedral and its role as the country's oldest city, the cradle of Finnish history.
On 4 September 1827, Turku suffered the greatest catastrophe in its history and one of the worst urban fires in the whole history of the Nordic countries. The fire, fanned by the wind and by the abundance of tightly packed wooden houses, spread with devastating speed and razed most of the city in a few hours. It is estimated that about three quarters of Turku burned, and thousands of people were left homeless. The cathedral itself was badly damaged, though its stone structure held.
The fire marked a before and after. The rebuilding followed a new urban plan, designed by the architect Carl Ludvig Engel — the same man who had drawn up the monumental centre of Helsinki — with wide, straight streets, squares and tree-lined boulevards intended to slow the spread of fire in the future. The Turku we see today, with its orderly layout, largely came out of that post-1827 reconstruction.
A single quarter was spared by the flames: Luostarinmäki, a group of craftspeople's wooden houses on a hill, which was left miraculously intact. Today it is an open-air museum and the only surviving evidence of what the wooden city looked like before the fire, a unique window onto old Åbo. The rebuilding, together with the loss of the capital status and of the university, closed Turku's chapter as the heart of Finland and opened its chapter as a great regional city.
Over the 19th and 20th centuries, Turku remade itself as a first-rate industrial and port city. Its harbour, facing Sweden and the Baltic, made it a key centre of Finnish shipbuilding: the Turku shipyards have been famous for building some of the largest cruise ships in the world, an industry still alive today. The city also recovered its university role: in the 20th century new universities were founded (the University of Turku, in Finnish, and Åbo Akademi, in Swedish), which returned it to the country's academic front line and gave it its characteristic young, student atmosphere.
Turku suffered, like all of Finland, the wars against the Soviet Union. In 1941, during the Continuation War, the city and its castle were hit by Soviet air raids; the castle was damaged but carefully restored in the following decades. After the war, Turku grew and modernised, keeping its bond with the sea and with the vast southwestern archipelago, the largest in Europe, which became one of its great tourist attractions and the setting of the Finnish summer.
In recent decades, Turku has strengthened its cultural profile: it was European Capital of Culture in 2011, it has a well regarded music and food scene, and it has revived the banks of the Aura river as its great public space, with museums, terraces and the characteristic restaurant boats. The city proudly keeps two traditions that tie it to the whole of Finland: being the country's oldest city and proclaiming, every 24 December since medieval times, the 'Christmas Peace', an act broadcast to the entire nation. The old capital is still, in a way, the historical heart of Finland.