Escape from Kakola

I visited the ex Turku central and provincial prison Kakola today. It was left empty in autumn 2007 when the new Southwest Finland provincial prison was deployed in Saramäki, Turku. At the moment Turku Touring organizes tours to Kakola but it's said that next year the city is going to start overhaul the Kakolanmäki area (which is a hill where all the prison buildings lie) to convert the area into a lively district for inhabitants and organizations.

Kakola is actually a nickname given by the public. The word "kako" is a very old Finnish word which means mentally ill person but although its contortion has ossified to the spoken language when speaking about the ex prison of Turku. Kakola has a reputation as Finland's toughest prison of all time because its strict discipline, plus that it has been a home for many notorious criminals. The building of the main building started in 1845 and it completed in 1853 when it was first named as a "work and correction centre" where they first started to put all the misbehaving vagabonds and jobless people to make them behave like law-abiding citizens. "Real prisoners" came later and officially they started to call Kakola a prison in the late 19th's.

Kakola is a cross-shaped building which all wings stand for different styles. Its influences come from different countries like Germany and USA but okay, the wings had different purposes because there are different prisoners. There was one wing for dangerous prisoners, another for isolation ones and et cetera. This shot I blipped is from the American-styled wing where the calmer prisoners used to live. There are those narrow corridors and that wide gap with a net so nobody could fall (or jump) from the heights to the cold hard concrete floor. I actually didn't understand the idea of those corridors because their narrowness but in the newest wing there was no gap in the middle of the wing but a real floor with lots of space.

We had a chance to check the cells, how they looked and could have looked because most of them were emptied. Very few cells had any furniture left there but then there was a cell with all the original property of a prisoner of the old days. There was a metal bed with a simple mattress and sheets, a writing desk and chair, some c-tapes and videos, some pens and paper, old posters and comics and a notice board for important info and a tub. So that was a prisoner's life.

There was a prison chapel too and it was actually very beautiful with all its glass paintings. The guide said that there has been a number of weddings in its history because the prison had a wing for women too so it was possible that two prisoners wanted to get married even the discipline was very strict. In the end of the tour we went to the prison estate where we saw a football, tennis and volleyball fields, a place to lift weights and a little pond where the prisoners used to swim at summertime. The pond lies in a quarry where the prisoners of 19th century mined all the stone for the main building. There was also a very worn out football which looked lonely in the windy yard. It strengthened the atmosphere which was very quiet and dreary.

So, it was a very interesting day filled with the history of Finnish legal system, prisons and prisoners. And now I'm home again ...that means that I managed to escape (with a rope made of sheets of course)!