Now that this summer's epic five week road trip is over I can get back to history.

In Finland there is a saying that something is a Chinese affair. It means that it requires quite a lot of effort to understand what the thing is about, and despite trying hard, is not quite understandable after all.

Well this place is a real Chinese affair.



This is a former mental asylum built in the 1960's and enlarged several times. The last time was in the early 1990's. The hospital closed down in 2006 and the property was sold to Chinese investors. They started a business offering accommodation and traditional Chinese treatments like massage and acupuncture in the old buildings.

Just a few years later the police stormed the place along with other Chinese owned properties in the area. Several people were arrested on suspicions of illegal entry, the CEO of this company was charged for bribery and breach of employment legislation. Even the former city mayor was charged for bribery for accepting massages free of charge.

The mayor was cleared of all charges and the Chinese businessman vanished abroad. Apparently all activity in the hospital had ceased by 2012. The roof was leaking, rainwater flooded the basement and froze there during winters.



The yellow part is the original hospital from the 1960's. The grey part is from the 1970's.



This is one of my all time favorite fails. The text says 'Finland to Finns' meaning basically immigrants out. Those are Swedish flags.



It's quite rare that you get to enter an abandoned building walking on a red carpet.



The mix of old mental asylum and new Chinese decorations is just awful.



Spotted on a public phone. Who would actually answer if I called the Soviet Union?



The kitchen looks like they just left.



Again something that looks like a Chinese restaurant.



Everything was ready for the tourists.

To be continued.

A pretty striking red wall.



A regional newspaper from 2011. That summer I worked for another newspaper in the same company and we often shared articles between the papers. This sparked a desire to find myself in an abandoned building some day. This time it wasn't the case.



A nice detail: the coats of arms of all the municipalities, which founded the hospital. They're made of tiny ceramic tiles.



A spiral.

And this was only the 1970's wing. Let's move on to the 1960's part.



Another staircase, this time less brightly painted.



Keys to their hearts?

Or probably just staff dressing room lockers.



Wall decorations. The materials, colors and cupboards indicated that everything was original from the 1960's and no larger renovations had ever been made.



Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't those crushed pills?



The isolation ward.



What did I say about the materials? Just look at that floor.



A small lobby and yet another different wall color.



More pills and brochures of the Chinese wellness company.



Go home, tub, u drunk.

A third post coming up from here.

Finally the 1990's wing, which was completely different from the other parts of the building. It was abandoned at less than 20 years old.



Even this area hasn't escaped the Chinese influence.



Some luxury left behind.



Another puzzling detail. The yellow lamp indicates that the sauna stove is on. The red lamp indicates an assault is going on. What a classic combination.



I'm not a fan of 1990's architecture, but this symmetry touches me inside somehow.



The final photo showing the 1960's and 1990's wings. In 2021 there was a massive fire in the attic of the old main building. It destroyed the roof and most of the top floor. The reason to the fire is suspected to be arson.

The city building officials immediately forbade the use of the building and entering it stating that it poses a hazard. Since the fire they have been trying to contact the owner, who has vanished. They are trying to give him a notice about an order to demolish the property.

In case they can’t find him, they have already started a procedure of demolishing the building and trying to make the owner pay for the costs. The fate of the hospital is sealed, yet it is still standing.

And recently there has been another strange turn of events. The hospital actually has two different owners. One owns the old main complex, the other one owns the 1990’s part nearest to the camera in the last picture. This means that the city has to start the demolition process all over again concerning the newest wing. Things are expected to take another year or two, so I might just as well do another exploration.

As usual there are more photos. A lot more: https://desertedfi...tal-asylum-2020-3/

After an extremely successful exploration to the mental asylum I present you a collection of photos from the following, less successful explorations.



First we have an abandoned service station.



The place had been closed for around 10 years. Some windows were broken, but had also been covered with plywood. Somebody takes care of the place, perhaps the entrepreneur using its grounds to excavate gravel.



Next we have an old dairy processing plant. I encountered this place for the first time in 2011, when it was still in use as a storage facility and by some car enthusiasts. I've been dreaming of entering ever since, but have so far been unsuccessful.



I did remember the place having a chimney back in the days.



This was the first time I went around to the back of the building, which was much larger than I expected. There was, however, an old building, which had been originally built for the plant workers, and it was still inhabited. I quickly left.



Here we have an old railway station. Unfortunately it was sealed.



And here's a former grocery store. It was called 'Choice 2000', but I doubt that it ever saw the year 2000.

This post was dedicated to the dark side of urban exploration: being left outside.

Moving on to something completely different. The next location isn't really urbex, but rather a memorial and a sightseeing spot for tourists. Due to its very strange nature I've featured it in here.



This is a perfect copy of a cell in the now demolished Shpalernaya prison in St. Petersburg, Russia. It's located on a very remote island in Eastern Finland.



As you can see, it's also a tomb.



That is where the remains of a Finnish guy called Jussi Reinikainen are located. He was a local guy running an inn in Vyborg in the 1910’s. He was recruiting Finnish independence fighters, charged for treason and locked up in Shpalernaya. He was given a death sentence, but the restlessness during the communist revolution allowed him to escape and return home.

He became a business man and a farmer, who served in the Finnish army during the second world war. In the late 1950’s he attended a meeting of former Jägers, who discussed building memorials. And he decided to build a perfect, 1:1 copy of his cell in the Shpalernaya on his island.

The building was completed in 1960 and Reinikainen used it as his fishing hut until 1969, when he died. He was cremated in Helsinki, and his remains were transported to the island, where they remain to this day. The door to the cell has been welded shut and you can’t actually enter it. But You can look through the door.

And if that wasn't enough for an adventure in the world of the dead...



This is the location of one of the most infamous unsolved homicide cases in Finnish criminal history. Back in 1960 three people were killed here and one was seriously wounded.

In case you aren't familiar with the case, here's more: https://en.wikiped...Lake_Bodom_murders

Moving on to something completely different. The next location isn't really urbex, but rather a memorial and a sightseeing spot for tourists. Due to its very strange nature I've featured it in here.



This is a perfect copy of a cell in the now demolished Shpalernaya prison in St. Petersburg, Russia. It's located on a very remote island in Eastern Finland.



As you can see, it's also a tomb.



That is where the remains of a Finnish guy called Jussi Reinikainen are located. He was a local guy running an inn in Vyborg in the 1910’s. He was recruiting Finnish independence fighters, charged for treason and locked up in Shpalernaya. He was given a death sentence, but the restlessness during the communist revolution allowed him to escape and return home.

He became a business man and a farmer, who served in the Finnish army during the second world war. In the late 1950’s he attended a meeting of former Jägers, who discussed building memorials. And he decided to build a perfect, 1:1 copy of his cell in the Shpalernaya on his island.

The building was completed in 1960 and Reinikainen used it as his fishing hut until 1969, when he died. He was cremated in Helsinki, and his remains were transported to the island, where they remain to this day. The door to the cell has been welded shut and you can’t actually enter it. But You can look through the door.

And if that wasn't enough for an adventure in the world of the dead...



This is the location of one of the most infamous unsolved homicide cases in Finnish criminal history. Back in 1960 three people were killed here and one was seriously wounded.

In case you aren't familiar with the case, here's more: https://en.wikiped...Lake_Bodom_murders

Very cool, thanks for sharing all this! It's awesome to see some urbex from outside of North America and I always love seeing what explorers are getting up to in other parts of the world.

If you know something about architecture, you probably know Alvar Aalto.

Well, this building is by him.



My tour has now reached the village of Mätäsvaara in the middle of nowhere near the Russian border. Some 90 years ago they found molybdenum here and opened a mine. Mr. Aalto was given the task to design most of the residential buildings in the village.

Some 80 years ago the mine closed. The village has lived on, but there are more and more empty windows, collapsed buildings and yards growing hay by the day.



The old power plant got an annex and was a café for years. Not anymore.



The former grocery store and restaurant of the village is still open. It is now a flea market, café and a very modest grocery store selling just the basic things. Ironically it is named The One-Horse Town Supermarket.

But where there's a mining village, there is usually a mine.



This one was open to the public.



The former quarry now houses a stage and a small stand for the audience. Every summer the local music festival arranges concerts here and they are hugely popular because of the unique surroundings. The acoustics in the former quarry are amazing.



If you were brave enough, you could explore the old mining tunnel. I never was.

Some ten years before my tour of Finland I somehow managed to end up becoming the producer for a theater group in charge of their tour to Eastern Finland. Don't ask me how and don't ask how it went. It was a catastrophe.

The host of the tour knew of my urban exploration habits and wanted to show me something. It was an old mental asylum in the middle of nowhere. It was too dark to take photos and the building was still intact despite being empty for a year. Even the electricity was on.

The building was vandalized but found new use and was repaired. After the company owning it went bust it was abandoned again, vandalized again and never repaired.

So I was back.



Has seen better days, as you can see.



First sights inside.



Ward 3. Wonder, what kind of patients it was about.



Whatever had been here, had been removed.



I kind of like the light inside.



They've been out of office for some time.




Looks like a canteen to me



Upstairs we go.



Imagine all the Cinderellas I should have found by now.



The other staircase.



The menu of the local pizzeria.



The letters are Cyrillic, the text is English and Finnish and makes no sense at all.



Another corridor.



She used to be a popular Finnish singer and this is a cover of her early album. Someone had printed a lot of them and thrown on the floor.



So much for this location.

As usual, there's more: https://desertedfi...tal-asylum-2020-4/

Not the best of photos because of the sun. But here, towering over a small town is an old mine.



The town was actually born because of this mine, which was founded in the 1920's. A new mine was built further down the copper vein in the 1930's and another in the 1950's. The oldest mine closed when the third one was opened, but they never demolished it.

This building now is the high school of the town.



The reason why they didn't demolish the place is a mystery. It proved a blessing. A mining museum opened here in the 1980's and the entire area is open for public. Its opening times are such, that I couldn't manage to attend.



It is probably the most beautiful mine in Finland.



The new mine closed down in the late 1980's and it was demolished along with the second mine apart from the 1950's tower, which still is one of the tallest in Europe.

They used to have guided tours up the tower but a mining company is researching new activities in the area and wants to demolish it. Let's see, what happens.

Today I present you two bad photos of fallen legends.



That over there is a former mill, which was founded more than 100 years ago. It was still in operation a week before I took the picture. Then, one night it caught fire. And that was the end of the story.

The whole village was still smelling of smoke. As there were people working in the area, I didn't dare to go closer.



And this here is a former restaurant and hotel. It was founded in 1934 and was one of the longest operating restaurants in the whole country on its 79th birthday. This was where the cultural elite of the town sat and drank, this was where touring artists spent time after their gigs in town. The place was a living legend.

The building was owned by an old person, who left it to a local cultural heritage association so that it would surely be preserved. The association kicked the restaurant out in 2013 and started preparing a new detail plan to demolish the building and replace it with a block of flats.

By the time of this picture, 7 years of court battles and activism were already behind and there was no end in sight.

Welcome to yet another remote corner of our strange country. This time it's time for yet another curious entrepreneurship story.

Back in the 1970's Finland was faced with a growing crisis as the rural areas were quickly becoming abandoned wasteland. Agriculture was mechanizing fast and wasn't labour intensive anymore. Unemployment was huge, and people were leaving to big cities en masse.

The government found a solution. They started co-operating with private companies to start factories in remote locations. The intention was to start tv tube production in this location, but the factories were given to other towns. This proved to be a blessing, as the tube business lasted for a full four years.

As a consolation prize, this small town got a factory manufacturing hospital textiles used in operating rooms. Years went by and it became the largest factory in the place. After several takeovers it became part of a large international corporation, and this eventually meant, that in 2003 the factory was closed.

The premises sat idle for around ten years, before somebody decided, it would be an ideal spot for making caviar. A company was founded with the help of Russian investors, and the factory was converted to a fish farm raising sturgeons. Even the Finnish state gave the project subsidies of more than one million euros.

The words were loud, but the actions didn’t speak for them. The farm was opened in 2011, but already a year later the company was in trouble. The plant was closed, the fish were taken away and the company finally went bankrupt in 2015 with debts of more than 14 million euros. Since then it has been at the mercy of disillusioned local youngsters with nothing more to do than break things up and spray the walls.



Here we go.



Their slogan was more spot on than they could ever imagine. The factory never produced a single can of caviar for sale.



This was basically what was inside. Large, empty halls.



An auditorium, where guests once were presented with facts about the factory. Certainly very interesting.



A lonely green chair.



The roof was leaking everywhere and had collapsed in several places.



The sturgeon tanks.

70+ photos more: https://desertedfi...viar-factory-2020/


I visited the place again in 2022. The sturgeon tanks had vanished. Around a year ago a Russian politician bought the place with 500 000 euros. He claims he has invented a generator, which produces electricity out of thin air. He aims to manufacture self-charging electric car engines at the plant.

It just gets fishier by the day.

After Finnish industrial history it's time for some retail history. Are you ready? No? Good. I'll tell anyway.

Back in the days before supermarkets there was of course a grocery store in every village. Or possibly even several stores, up to four. The reason was the way they were grouped around wholesale companies.

Back in the early days of modern time a group of large, regional wholesale companies formed a central company, which created a unified brand for these small businesses. As a result smaller wholesale companies did the same and created their own group and their own brands.

These two groups consisted of stores run by private entrepreneurs. Already early on active villagers started their own co-operatives to provide them with their daily needs. The co-op:s grouped under one central organization, but again not everybody was satisfied. The socialists didn't agree with this and founded their own central organization and network called the workers' co-operatives.

So the result was that there were all these competing stores in every corner. In the 1980's the market started consolidating and now there are only two of the original chains left.

But this means that there are a lot of abandoned stores in Finland. Here we have two of them:



The one closer to the camera is the former co-operative store. It is recognizable because of its functionalist architecture. The S-group employed their own architect, Erkki Huttunen, who designed similar boxes around the country. His architecture is actually quite valued nowadays, unfortunately this example hasn't been treated very well.

The building behind it is the former workers' co-operative store. It has been since converted into apartments.



Here we have the other store in an even smaller village with less than 50 houses. The other one is on the other side of the road.

Most of these have been abandoned in the 1980's or 1990's, some even earlier. Several have been converted into apartments, but I've heard rumors about stores, which still look pretty much like the living 1970's.

Still waiting to find access to one.

This time there's less history and more photos:



This here is a former dairy processing plant. It stopped playing with milk in the early 1970's.



The place later saw action as some kind of a workshop.



It was in a dreadful condition and pretty messy.



Imagine, that the most important thing they told about the Renault van in the sticker was that it had a 5-speed gearbox.



Easily the greatest design flaw I've ever seen. Apparently others think so too. The photo was copied and republished by some Canadian tv personality. I wasn't very pleased about that.



Upstairs there was a meeting room and some staff apartments. It turned out that they were merely small apartment rooms.



Such as this.



And this.



And this.



Luckily there was a second set of stairs down, so the inhabitants didn't have to parkour to get downstairs.



The apartment rooms shared a toilet, which was really pink and cute.



It looked a bit like somebody had started renovations, but then given up the daunting task of making the place livable.



So long, little dairy plant.

For more photos, see: https://desertedfi...airy-plant-2020-2/

Next I present you a collection of locations, which were out of bounds this time.



We begin with this 1950's built town hall, which was abandoned in 2011 and destined for demolition. Years had passed, but nothing much had happened.



The area also included a small block of flats originally built to house municipal workers. It was also on the demolition list, but the municipality weren't in a hurry.



They were a bit more active here. This old store was destined to make way to a block of flats. It was torn down the same autumn and has now been replaced.



And here we have a school in a small island. It was more than 100 years old, when the politicians decided that it should be replaced by a new one. The demolition crew had already kicked off, when I arrived. Now the pupils are already studying in a new school.



And the final location this time: three similar blocks of flats built in the 1940’s and 1950’s by a nearby cement factory for their workers. They were in this use all the way to the early 2000’s when they were made available to be hired by anyone.

The local paper states, that the houses were very primitive. The toilets and showers were shared until the 1980’s, when each apartment got their own. Not much was done to keep them in good shape and they were finally abandoned and closed in 2011.

There was a fire in one of the basements and after that the owner wanted to demolish them. They are however listed as regionally important buildings, and permission wasn’t granted.

So much this time.

Today we visit a beautiful, ruined match factory.



They had plans to convert this into apartments, but the plan has failed due to lack of funds, extensive vandalism, several fires and finally because of contaminated soil. The cost of clean up was too much for the project.



The place was in such a bad condition, that I just photographed it through the windows.



The roof was completely missing in some sections of the building.



The sunset was really beautiful.



There were big holes in the roof.

More stuff here: https://desertedfi...atch-factory-2020/

A very early morning just outside a small town, when suddenly I spot this. When I was parking my car, I still didn't know, what a strange encounter was coming up.



And this was as far as I got before a small old lady with a huge German shepherd dog comes and asks me, what I'm doing there. I tell her I tour Finland and photograph abandoned buildings and she starts screaming, but not at me.

She tells me this is a former teacher seminar built in the late 19th century and enlarged throughout the years. It was closed in the 1970's and became an updating education center for teachers, but was closed for good more than 10 years ago.

A Chinese businessman bought it and wanted to start a company educating Chinese nurses in Finland. He failed to obtain permission, left the country and just let everything rot.

The old lady is furious about this waste of wonderful buildings. She tells me that she lives nearby and calls cops every single weekend, when she hears teenagers smash things inside. Every morning she takes her dog for a walk and locks all the entrances, which have been opened. She has contacted the city, nobody does nothing.

She keeps on ranting and soon switches to other topics. It seems like she hasn't had anyone to rant to in a while, so I think I might as well listen, as I believe I have no way past her. Soon she begins ranting about covid and how it has made her hobbies impossible. I ask her, what she does, she says folk dance.

What a coincidence. I do folk dance, too. I tell her the name of my group, she has seen us perform on festivals.

Suddenly she's in a very good mood. She proceeds to show me around the area and point every single broken entrance to the six buildings in the block. I ask her whether she will call the cops if I enter the buildings.

She says, she won't. She says that she knows that I'm a good person and besides they're not her buildings. She doesn't care.



Not believing my ears I am left standing in front of the old main building.











Am I the only one, who thinks that they look like...

My next address was the newer main building on the same lot.





















There was even a dormitory wing. A 1970's dormitory building can be seen through the windows.



Not a very sharp photo, but shows what this place was all about after its Finnish use ended.



The sauna of the teacher seminar.



The headmaster's building. I couldn't find access.



The canteen building. Couldn't find access there either.

A gallery of 120 photos here: https://desertedfi...cher-seminar-2020/

Today's post is all about traffic.



This is where Vanhanvaaruntie (Old Vaaru Road) starts. Until the 1980's it was the steepest section of the Finnish highway network. A new road was opened in 1984, and this one became a dead end and a scenic route.



I'm not quite sure, if these photos do justice to the steepness of the route. I could feel it in my thighs, though.



There is a vantage point by the route. The road starts a bit higher than the lake, though.



Not only was the road steep, it was also almost straight from end to end with the only major curve being on the top of the hill. Imagine your brakes breaking up there.

And then for something completely different.



This is a memorial erected to honor the 26 victims of the worst peacetime rail accident in Finland. The accident was a head-on collision of two trains because of a catastrophic communication error.

The other locomotive was completely destroyed, but the other one was repaired and returned to service. As it happens to be, I know the location of this 'killer locomotive', and it will be featured later on.

This colorful thing had been a nursing home for elderly people. It was built in the 1950's and was set to be demolished to make way for a residential area. Of course I had to go have a look, as I was nearby.



I found no broken doors or windows, so I decided to try the nearest entrance. It opened. Whoever had been here last, had forgotten to lock the doors.



The buildings had served their final days as a legal graffiti wall for youngsters. The paint on the windows made the rooms quite spooky in some areas.



Even this building hasn't survived the live, love, laugh hysteria.



The colors give the tiles a nice appearance.



This has served as an assembly room. And judging by the fact that the kitchen was right behind it, it has also been the canteen.



The remains of a Big Mac meal. And they say those don't catch mold. This one did.



This was about as far as I got. There was a motion detector, which caused the lights to go on. I didn't stay inside to wait what else it would cause to go on.

The building was demolished a few months later. The rest of the photos can be found in this gallery: https://desertedfi...-hameenlinna-2020/