If you don’t know, I’m something of an enthusiast of ecclesiastical architecture. Well, I’m a fan of Norman and Gothic. St Paul’s leaves me cold and while I appreciated its Gothic grandeur, Truro Cathedral was disappointing in that it was brick and only a little over a century old. So I stopped by three churches while I was in Helsinki in May.
Number one was Helsinki Cathedral. In order to differentiate it from Uspenski Cathedral, also a cathedral in Helsinki, you might see it sometimes called the Lutheran Cathedral or the White Cathedral. It’s a big square Neoclassical thing with four small green domes on its side arms and a large dome on the tower in the middle, it’s otherwise gleaming white and it sits on its own mini hill on Senate Square, surrounded by yellow Neoclassical buildings, built as Helsinki’s new main square in the early 19th century. The cathedral was started in 1818 and completed in 1852.
I appreciate it as a landmark. You can almost always see it and I like the way it seems to float above the city when seen from the water. The steps are a great place to sit out in the sun on summer days and the platforms halfway up house cafes with terraces. The square and the surroundings are definitely a favourite. But the cathedral itself? It’s not my style. I like the outside, in its way. It’s minty. It feels clean and fresh, I like the colonnades and pediment on the front – not entire sure it actually has a front but if it does, it’s surely the side facing the square. But inside, I found it a disappointment. It’s quite bare but not quite bare enough to look properly minimalist.
The walls are painted the lightest shade of baby blue and the plasterwork is white. The effect is of a home in the 90s that no one’s got round to decorating just yet. The inside ceilings of the domes are a shade that I’m tempted to call “plaster that’s just finished drying and hasn’t been painted yet”. Worst crime of all, it doesn’t feel like it soars. That’s my favourite thing about Gothic churches. Even with all the stonework unpainted, unpolished, just plain white, the whole thing soars. You can see how the architects, and probably the whole Gothic movement, thought about their church reaching up to heaven. Neoclassical doesn’t do that. That said, that’s a me problem, not a church problem. It’s simply not a style of architecture that I personally like.
Number two was Uspenski Cathedral, the excellent red brick green-domed Orthodox cathedral just opposite the end of the road and also dating to the early 19th century. This one was far more me. Russian Revival isn’t really my style either but I appreciate the drama of it. Uspenski also sits on a little hill, raised above the ordinary people going about their day. It probably has just as many mini towers and domes as the Lutheran cathedral and yet the red brick and the gold accents make it look a lot more dramatic than its simple and elegant sibling. Of course, the addition of a bell tower just a little way downhill from the main building helps with this.
It took two attempts to visit Uspenski. It was closed the first time I tried, which I suspect was the Monday afternoon when I got back from the zoo. There was a school trip in there when I got there, and also some kind of ceremony going on. It was frescoed floor to ceiling and right up into the dome, exactly like the churches in Russia but this time, they were quite happy for people to take photos as long as they didn’t use the flash and didn’t interfere with what was going on. Now, the frescoes do seem to have a beige-grey-brown as the base colour but there’s plenty of gold and there’s a huge gold iconostasis.
Anyway you can put a knot or a swirl or a cross, anywhere you can apply some gold paint – or maybe gold leaf – it’s been done. There’s barely an inch left uncovered of the entire church. Massive gold chandeliers hang incredibly low, holding what look like hundreds of candles. They’re probably electric because who’s going to light them all and keep them trimmed but the effect is still pretty spectacular. I find Orthodox Christianity – or at least, the Russian version – very unwelcoming to strangers and newcomers in a way that, say, the Church of England isn’t but yeah, I liked this church a lot more than the Lutheran one.
The third is Finland’s famous Church in the Rock. This one is just far enough out of the city centre that you have to arrive by tram rather than on foot. Its actual name is Temppeliaukio Church but it takes its name because it’s built into a huge plug of rock. It’s in a square with Art Deco apartment buildings on all four sides but in the middle is a low rocky hill. You can walk up there if you like and in the middle, invisible from many angles, you’ll come across the dome roof. You can’t see through it, it’s supported by a wall of rock that’s just a little too high to peer through and there are signs requesting that you don’t climb up.
Once you go inside, you can start to piece it together better. The church kind of looks like it was made with a huge round biscuit cutter through extremely thick dough. The hill has just had a circle cut out of it. The walls are bare rock but fairly low and then the concrete and glass edges of the dome are set into the rock and in the middle, a great big copper disc keeps the sun out. Those concrete and glass edges let plenty of light in – it’s probably lighter in here than it is in either of the cathedrals, despite it being literally carved out of the rock.
If you’re expecting something cave-like, you’re going to be disappointed. This looks exactly like any modern happy-clappy church except that it’s circular, its walls are rock and it’s got this dome on the top. If anything, it looks something like the set of a desert episode of Star Trek, only with an altar and a ceiling. This one is very welcoming. Well, it would be. It takes a €5 entrance fee off every tourist. I don’t blame it, exactly. You do kind of go “Oh, come on, the others are free” but there’s no reason whatsoever not to charge tourists to come and look at your thing and the result is that someone will greet you with a genuine smile when you arrive and your cashier will tell you where to go and what to look at. There are information boards telling you the history of the church and there’s a mini gift shop which I used for some postcards.
Probably the best place to take a look from is the upstairs seating. The stairs are round to the left of the cashiers, they have a low ceiling, then there’s a short corridor and you emerge onto a balcony overlooking the church and the tourists where you can take a proper look at the dome and the walls. It’s the chairs here that make it feel modern, I think. The Lutheran cathedral has the wooden variety and there are none in Uspenski (I suspect perhaps there’s a storeroom somewhere) but here you have red-covered woven seats of exactly the kind you’d find in any church hall in the UK, all set out nicely. It doesn’t feel crowded. It doesn’t feel like there’s anywhere you wouldn’t be able to see what’s going on at the front.
I can see that someone clearly wondered what to do with this square in the middle of the apartments. Normally it would probably be a small park. But it was so rocky, that was clearly impossible. So when they wanted to build a new church, this was a good-sized space and I guess the most practical thing to do was to dig it out. There were two competitions for the church that was somehow going to sit on or in the rock – the first was interrupted by WWII. The work was begun in February 1968 and finished in September 1969. Eighteen months is a pretty quick turnaround for any kind of church, I think, let alone one as unique as this. There was no pattern to follow. No one had done this before. You’ve seen those idiots on Grand Designs. They can take four or five years, easy peasy, and that’s just for a house. This is a church, cut out of the rock, and they managed it in a year and a half! In Finland, where it’s dark for more than eighteen hours a day for a significant chunk of the year.
Ultimately, there isn’t actually much to see here. Once you’ve seen the rock walls and the copper dome, that’s about it. It’s worth seeing, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely recommend you jump on a tram and go to see the church. But don’t expect it to take more than about twenty minutes out of your day.
So there you have it. My favourites, in order, are Church in the Rock, Uspenski Cathedral and last, the Lutheran Cathedral. If I go again, I’ll have a look at St John’s Church, which is Finland’s largest church (by seating capacity, apparently) and is in the Gothic Revival style, which means I’ll like the Gothic but disapprove of the brick. Kamppi Chapel might be interesting to see too. I apparently walked right past it without taking any notice of it whatsoever. To be fair to me, it doesn’t look like a church and I probably assumed it was a modern block of public toilets. I’ll be fixing that error next time I’m in Helsinki. If you’re ever there, pop out to the Church in the Rock.