A Nation That Plays

Finland is a quiet country — and yet, per capita, it produces more professional musicians, more festival-goers and more internationally successful metal bands than almost any nation on earth. Over 50 metal bands per 100,000 inhabitants. A national epic sung to a harp-like kantele. A composer, Sibelius, whose music was so powerful it was banned by an empire.

The same restraint runs through the Finnish year — until it doesn’t. On the first of May the whole country puts on a white student cap and drinks sima in the park. At Midsummer the cities empty overnight and the lake shores fill with bonfires. In December candles appear in every window and the market opens on Senate Square. Finns will tell you they are an undemonstrative people. Their calendar says otherwise.

Between those two poles sits a summer of festivals — metal in the forest at Nummirock, jazz by the sea in Pori, opera inside a medieval castle at Savonlinna — and a handful of competitions so strange they could only have started here. Below is when it all happens.