Hannu Salmi
The catastrophe known as the Great Fire of Turku was the largest conflagration in the history of the Nordic countries. Three quarters of the city were destroyed in the fire that started on 4 September 1827, at 9 o』clock in the evening. The fire raged through the night, in some parts of the city until 6 September, and the soil was hot for weeks afterwards. The city of Turku had burned down at least 30 times before, but the fire of 1827 was the last one, making room for a more modern, spacious city structure that was meant to prevent such disasters from recurring. As callous as it may sound, the fire benefited the process of modernisation.
In 1827, Turku was known as the oldest city of Finland, with a gothic cathedral and with a university that had been founded by Queen Christina in 1640. It was also the largest city in the country with its 12,000 inhabitants, and 11,000 of them lost their homes in the catastrophe. These figures can be compared to the fire of London in 1666 when 70,000 of the 80,000 inhabitants of London became homeless. In both cases around 90 per cent of the citizens lost their homes.
Often, a disaster happens under circumstances in which different unfavourable conditions converge. It is significant that the conflagrations of Turku and London started in early September, the London fire on the 2nd and the Turku fire on the 4th of September. In both cases there had been a particularly dry summer, and at least in the case of Turku, there was a significant amount of dry hay in the barns. Furthermore, the weather conditions changed rapidly after 9 pm; the wind started to rise and soon there was a tremendous windstorm. It was also market time, and many of the men were in Tampere, 143 kilometres away from Turku, and almost all of the students were out of the city because the academic year had not yet started. Thus, there were fewer people in the city to assist in extinguishing the fire. Turku was to a large extent a women’s city at the time of the disaster.
The aim of this chapter is to explore the emotional response to the catastrophe that effaced much of the medieval past of the city, destroyed the library of the Academy of Turku almost completely and left 11,000 people homeless. The chapter focuses especially on the question of guilt, which was continuously referred to not only in the trial after the fire but also in the press and, of course, in the streets of the ruined city. What is interesting is that the memory of the catastrophe has had a persistent gendered emphasis that has continued to the present day. In the discourse on the fire, maintained by history books, newspapers and popular memories, the role of a maid, a femaleservant is repeatedly emphasised. Thus, it is essential to ask what this gendered memory of the catastrophe means, what it entails and how it relates to the transition from the early modern town to a modern city. This particular maidservant has also a name in the memory of the fire: she was Maria Vass, and she probably is the only early nineteenth-century maidservant whose name, after almost two centuries, is still remembered and recognised by the city dwellers. This chapter aims at analysing this gendered remembrance of the greatest catastrophe in Finnish urban history.
A Moment of Terror
The fire started in the Northern Quarter of the city, in the house of the merchant Hellman. The owner Carl Gustaf Hellman was himself in Stockholm and, returning after a few days, he found his home in ashes. The fire brigade which was strongly criticised after the catastrophe, headed towards the hill of Aninkainen where Hellman’s house was situated, but there was nothing that could be done. The wind threw sparks and cinders behind the fire fighters who were not able to contain the emerging catastrophe.
The rising wind pressed the flames down the hill towards the river Aura that flows through the city. The most valuable buildings, like the cathedral and the academy, were on the other side of the river. The citizens probably thought that the river would prevent the spread of the conflagration, but this did not happen. Soon, the sparks had reached the roof of Gustaf Hällström’s house, which was a visible landmark near the cathedral. The burning of Hällström’s roof was mentioned regularly in the press coverage, probably because he was a professor of physics at the Academy and a notable figure in the city. After a couple of hours, around midnight, the fire started to approach the cathedral. Very quickly, the city was like an ocean of flames. That evening, the Prussian astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander (1799–1875), who had been working in Turku since 1823 and was collecting evidence for his ground-breaking research on star movements and magnitudes, was sitting in the observatory on the southern side of the city. His observation diary tells that he was just writing down remarks on the star Aquilae, when the emerging catastrophe caught his eye: 『My observations were interrupted by a terrible fire that very nearly burnt the entire city to cinders.』 The cathedral bells were heard to toll 3 o』clock in the morning. After that, the flames had reached the top of the tower and the bells collapsed.
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