Finland

About Finland

     Finland, or the Republic of Finland (Finnish: Suomi; Swedish: Finland (help·info)), is a Nordic country situated in Northern Europe. It has borders with Sweden to the west, Russia to the east, and Norway to the north, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland. The capital city is Helsinki.

     Finland has a population of 5,238,460 people, spread over an area of 338,145 square kilometres (130,559 square miles). The majority of the population is concentrated in the southern part of the country. Finland is the sixth largest country in Europe in terms of area, with a low population density of 15.5 persons per square kilometre, making it the most sparsely populated country in the European Union. As their mother tongue, most Finns speak Finnish, one of the few official languages of the European Union that is not of Indo-European origin. The second official language, Swedish, is spoken natively by a 5.5 percent minority.

     Previously part of Sweden and from 1809 an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire, Finland declared its independence in 1917. Today, Finland is a democratic, parliamentary republic and has been a member state of the United Nations since 1955 and the European Union since 1995. Finland has thriving services and manufacturing sectors and is a highly democratic welfare state with low levels of corruption, consistently ranking at or near the top in international comparisons of national performance.

    Finland is eleventh on the United Nations' Human Development Index and ranked as the sixth happiest nation in the world. According to the World Audit Democracy profile, Finland is the freest nation in the world in terms of civil liberties, freedom of the press, low corruption levels and political rights. Finland is rated the sixth most peaceful country in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit and since 1945, Finland has been at peace, adopting neutrality in wartime.

     Finland was rated the best country to live in by Reader's Digest study released in October 2007, which looked at issues such as quality of drinking water and greenhouse gas emissions as well as factors such as education and income.

About Vaasa

     Vaasa (Swedish: Vasa) is a city on the west coast of Finland. It received its charter in 1606, during the reign of Charles IX of Sweden and is named after the Royal House of Vasa. Today, Vaasa has a population of 57,501 (July 2007) , and is part of the administrative province of Western Finland and is the regional capital of Ostrobothnia.

     The city is bilingual with 71.5% of the population speaking Finnish as their first language and 24.9% speaking Swedish. The city is an important centre for Finland-Swedish culture.

     Vaasa has three universities. The largest one is the University of Vaasa, which is located in the neighbourhood of Palosaari. Palosaari is a peninsula near the center of Vaasa, connected to it by bridges. The other two universities are Åbo Akademi, headquartered in Turku, and the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration, or Hanken, headquartered in Helsinki. Unique to Vaasa is the Finland-Swedish teachers training school, part of Åbo Akademi. University of Helsinki also has a small unit, specialized in law studies, in the same premises as Vaasa University.

     The city has two Universities of Applied Sciences: Vaasa University of Applied Sciences (former Vaasa Polytechnic), located right next to the University of Vaasa, and Swedish University of Applied Sciences (former Swedish Polytechnic).

    Over the years, Vaasa has changed its name several times, due to alternative spellings, political decisions and language condition changes. At first it was called Mustasaari or Mussor after the village where it was founded in 1606, but just a few years later the name was changed to Wasa to honor the royal Swedish lineage. The city was known as Wasa between 1606 and 1855, Nikolainkaupunki (Finnish) and Nikolaistad (Swedish) between 1855 and 1917, Vaasa (Finnish) and Vasa (Swedish) beginning from 1917, with the Finnish name being the primary name from ca 1930 when Finnish speakers became the majority in the city.

     The history of Korsholm (Mustasaari in Finnish) and also of Vaasa begins in the 14th century, when seafarers from the coastal region in central Sweden disembarked at the present Old Vaasa, and the wasteland owners from Finland Proper came to guard their land.

     In the middle of the century Saint Mary's Church was built and in the 1370's the building of the fortress at Korsholm, Crysseborgh, was undertaken, and served as an administrative centre of the Vasa County. King Charles IX of Sweden founded the town of Mustasaari/Mussor on October 2, 1606 around the oldest harbour and trade point around the Korsholm church approximately seven kilometres to the southwest from the present city. In 1611 the town was chartered and renamed after the Royal House of Vasa.

     Thanks to the sea connections, ship building and trade, especially tar trade, Vaasa flourished in the 17th century and most of the inhabitants earned their living from it.

    In 1683 the three-subject or 'trivial' school moved from Nykarleby to Vaasa and four years later a new schoolhouse was built in Vaasa. The first library in Finland was founded in Vaasa in 1794. In 1793 Vaasa had 2,178 inhabitants, and in the year of the catastrophic town fire of 1852 the number had risen to 3,200.