Savonlinna

The town owes its existence to its castle. In 1475 Erik Axelsson Tott founded Olavinlinna on a rocky island in the Kyrönsalmi strait, between the lakes Haukivesi and Pihlajavesi, to protect Savo and control the unstable border between the Kingdom of Sweden and Russia. It is the northernmost medieval stone fortress still standing. A town was founded beside it in 1639, but it struggled: after its town rights were withdrawn its population fell to between 100 and 150 people, and the border moved back and forth through the wars of the following century. In July 1812 a great fire destroyed 19 houses.

Growth came with transport. The Saimaa Canal opened in 1856 and the railway arrived in 1907, and steamships linked the town with the rest of the lake system and the coast; the steam schooner Salama, built in 1874 for a local steamship company, sank in 1898 and was raised in 1971 as a museum ship. The canal brought tourists to the Olavi spa, opened in 1896, and in the early 20th century Savonlinna was famous as a spa town.

In 1912 the soprano Aino Ackté organised the first opera festival in the castle, the beginning of the event for which the town is known today. In 2013 the neighbouring municipalities of Kerimäki and Punkaharju were joined to Savonlinna, bringing the world's largest wooden church and the Punkaharju ridge within its borders. A track realignment closed the old railway station in 2011, and the line westward towards Rantasalmi has since been cut.

The opera festival defines Savonlinna. First held in 1912 and revived as an annual event in 1967, it has grown into an internationally recognised month-long festival staged inside Olavinlinna, with a total audience of around 60,000, an estimated quarter of them from abroad. As the festival opens, on the first weekend of July, the town also holds the OperaGames, a three-day show-jumping competition, and the town's official birthday falls on St Olaf's Day, 29 July.

Savonlinna sits in Savo, whose people are known across Finland for a roundabout, joking manner of speech and a distinctive dialect. It calls itself the Capital of Saimaa, and lake life — steamers, cottages, rowing boats and evening swims — is at the centre of local identity. Old lake steamers still carry sightseeing passengers from the harbour every summer.

Art and education have their own traditions: one of the town's upper secondary schools, specialising in art subjects, was the first specialised high school in Finland and in all of the Nordic countries when it opened in 1967. In sport, the top-tier volleyball team Saimaa Volley plays some of its home matches in the town, and Basket Savonlinna has produced national team players.

About 31,000 people lived in Savonlinna at the start of 2025, down from about 34,700 at the end of 2017, and about 38,000 in the sub-region. The municipality is vast — about 3,600 square kilometres, more than a third of it water — and takes in the villages of Kerimäki, Punkaharju and Savonranta as well as the town itself, which is one of the two main centres of South Savo with Mikkeli and the seat of a hospital district.

Healthcare, education and tourism are prominent: besides the hospital district, the town has a university of applied sciences campus with laboratories for wood processing and electronics. The summer brings a surge of visitors and cottage residents, above all in July, while the rest of the year the town is quiet. The population has been falling for years.

Homes spread across the islands and shores around the straits, from flats in the centre to houses on Talvisalo and in the eastern suburbs. Life follows the seasons: boats, swimming and berry picking in summer, skiing and ice fishing on the frozen lakes in winter.

The town's own speciality is the lörtsy, a thin, half-moon-shaped pastry invented in Savonlinna and an essential part of local food culture. The savoury version has a filling of meat and rice like a Finnish meat pie, and street vendors serve it with the same condiments — pickled cucumber and chopped raw onion, and sometimes a hot-dog sausage — folded around them like a taco. The sweet version holds apple jam and resembles a jam doughnut. Lörtsy are associated with South Savo but are now sold across Finland.

The wider Savo and Karelian table is close at hand. Karelian pies, thin rye-crust pastries most often filled with rice and spread with egg butter, are eaten throughout Finland, and kalakukko, fish, pork and bacon baked inside a rye loaf, is a traditional dish of Savo. Lake fish such as vendace, freshly fried or smoked, is sold at the market square, and summer brings bilberries, lingonberries and mushrooms from the forests.

Eating out centres on the market square by the harbour and the streets around it, and in summer on the cafés and terraces around the castle and the lake shores. The town is at its busiest during the July festival.