In Ristiina you can still go back to the "Count's time", which was lived during the reign of Finnish Governor-General Per Brahe from 1637 to 1640 and from 1648 to 1654. When Queen Kristiina of Sweden granted Count Peter Brahe a large area of Savo as a fiefdom in 1640, he decided to build a castle in Ristiina as the administrative centre of his fiefdom. She named the town Kristiina after his wife Kristiina Stenbock, but the locals dropped the K from the name and it became Ristiina.

Construction of the Brahelinna, which began in 1646, continued until the late 1660s. The unfinished main building was a rectangle of about 20 m x 9 m in plan, surrounded by a three-metre-high stone wall. The lower floor was made of brick and the upper floor of wood, and there was also a small cellar. The wall was flanked by a wooden platform. The main gate was on the south-eastern side of the wall. There was a small side gate at the north and west corners. There is a small projection on the south side of the wall, from which a shot could have been fired in front of the main gate if necessary.

When the divided fiefdoms were returned to the Crown by the reduction, Brahelinna became the office of the commander of the Savo Infantry Regiment. After the Great Northern War, the building fell into disrepair, and building materials were taken from it for the New Brahelinna, which had been used as an official house since 1739. This newer building is now known as the War College.

The ruins are located on a mica moraine, which was a small rocky outcrop at the mouth of the ancient Baltic Sea, the Yoldi Sea, when it was released from the glacier some 11 400 years ago. The mica bedrock is visible as a series of glacially grooved siliciclastic rocks. A monument to J.Z.Duncker (1774-1809) has been erected on one of them. Duncker was a lieutenant colonel in the Swedish army and was originally from Ristiina.

Image: Kärki Pekka 1988, Museovirasto