Ruokolahti church

Three panels in the sign open up different contents on your mobile device (a series of panels beginning with the title “Discover the hidden treasures of Lake Saimaa”). You need the free Salmi AR app to view the content. Content includes pictures, videos, audio narration, and peepholes. You’ll find information about Suvorov’s time, wartime, and industrialization, and get to see what the area looked like 11,000 years ago and how the ancestors lived. The contents are currently available only in Finnish. 

Among the most famous works of Albert Edelfelt, one of the most famous artists of the Finnish Golden Age, is ‘Women of Ruokolahti on the Church Hill’ (1887). Edelfelt sought genuine Karelian people from Ruokolahti and sketched them on the spot. However, he finished the actual work at Haikko, at the family’s summer villa, where Edelfelt had a studio. Behind the Ruokolahti church, where the women of the painting are sitting, is a monument telling us today about the Edelfelt’s visit to Ruokolahti.

Read the story Elli and Albert, inspired by the Edelfelt’s visit to the Ruokolahti and written in the Rural Explorer project (Story: Pekka Vartiainen, Translation: Annira Silver).

Information about the story: “At the end of the 1800s, Finnish artists of the so-called Golden Age sought folksy, realistic subjects, and in the hope of finding inspiration, also the company of common people. The trips popularised by the Kalevala boom were often to eastern Finland. Albert Edelfelt was one of the painters who travelled to Vuoksenlaakso in 1877 to look for and paint common country folk. He stayed for some time in the home of Elli Jäppinen, the folk healer renowned in Finland and Russia. One of Edelfelt’s best-known paintings ‘Women of Ruokolahti on the Church Hill’ (1887) dates back to his time in Ruokolahti; it was admired in big cities around Europe – and later also in Finland.”