Helsinki Day 4

A special day today! A couple of days earlier, someone had posted a link to a paper about coffins containing frogs that had been discovered in churches in Finland. Some of them were held at the National Museum. My husband contacted the museum, not sure if it would be possible to arrange a special visit since we only had a couple of days left. Not only was the folklore expert able to meet us but those very coffins had just been taken out of storage for study and we were able to go and see them! If they had been in storage, it wouldn't have been possible to retrieve them in time.

The coffins apparently had different meanings. The ones with the frogs were made up by fisherman in the hope that bad luck in fishing would be transferred to someone else and so they themselves would get the good luck. The one with the wooden poppet looks creepy but was thought to have been a way to try to cure someone of illness. The coffins were made up and stuffed into cracks in the floorboards and so on in the local church. Fascinating isn't it?

We had a little bit of time before the museum proper opened so we visited the Moomin shop. I may have bought a couple of things! We also visited the Suomalainen Kirjakauppa where I was excited to find a beautiful book of Finnish birds. It was duly snapped up.

We then spent most of the rest of the day in the museum. Unfortunately there is not a special Finnish folk magic exhibition. I hope that one day there will be one as we would go there specially to see it! While we were there the museum had a special Barbie exhibition instead - we didn't go to see that..