Vyborg

Vyborg began as a trading place of the Karelians on the western mouth of the Vuoksi, long since dried up. In 1293, during the Third Swedish Crusade, the Swedish marshal Torkel Knutsson built a stone castle on the site of an older Karelian fort, and it became the first centre for the spread of Christianity in Karelia. The castle was fought over between Sweden and Novgorod until the Treaty of Nöteborg in 1323 confirmed it as Swedish. King Eric of Pomerania granted the town its trade privileges in 1403, a wall was completed in the 1470s, and in 1496–97 Vyborg held out against a long Russian siege.

Peter the Great took the town in 1710 during the Great Northern War, and the Treaty of Nystad confirmed the transfer in 1721. In 1790 the Battle of Vyborg Bay, one of the largest naval battles in history, was fought just offshore. In 1812 Alexander I joined the town to the new Grand Duchy of Finland, and it became one of the Grand Duchy's most important towns; the Saimaa Canal, opened in 1856, linked it with the Finnish lakes.

In independent Finland, Viipuri was the country's second most important city, and the most multicultural, with Swedish, German, Russian, Tatar, Romani and Jewish minorities. During the Winter War more than 70,000 people were evacuated, and the town was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940. Finnish troops retook it in 1941 and about 28,000 people had returned by 1944, when the Red Army captured it on 20 June and the Finnish population was evacuated once more. Finland gave up its claim in 1947, and Vyborg was resettled by Soviet citizens.

Vyborg's identity rests on its layered past: a Swedish castle, Russian fortifications, Finnish streets of the early 20th century and a Soviet town built into them after 1944. It belongs to the Silver Ring of historic towns of north-western Russia, and its Finnish years are remembered with deep nostalgia in Finland, where many of the evacuated families settled. The streets and districts received new Russian names in a single campaign in 1948.

Before the war Vyborg was a major Finnish centre of culture, especially of choral singing, and the Viipurin Lauluveikot male choir, founded in the town in 1897, keeps that tradition alive in Finland today. The modern town has its own theatre and several museums, and since 1992 has hosted Window to Europe, a festival of Russian cinema held each August in the Vyborg Palace cinema, which opened in 1962 in the rebuilt old town hall.

Summer is festival season, with folk music in the castle in May, Celtic music in Monrepos in June and historical reenactments on the Anne fortifications in July. Architecture draws many visitors: the Aalto library is widely recognised as a pioneering masterpiece of functionalist architecture. In 2010 the town was given the title of City of Military Glory.

About 72,500 people lived in Vyborg at the 2021 census, slightly below the town's official peak of about 81,000 in 1996. Since 2008 the town has been divided into ten microdistricts. Around the historic centre on its peninsula, post-war housing spread from the 1960s into the area east of Battery Hill, where war had destroyed many of the older low-rise houses.

The economy rests on paper production, the Vyborg Shipyard, the port and the town's role as the administrative centre of Vyborgsky District. A converter station built in 1982 links the Russian and Finnish power grids, and the Russian end of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline lies at Portovaya Bay nearby.

Many old buildings in the centre remain in poor condition, and their repair is a constant local concern. The town once lived from its position on the road and railway between St Petersburg and Helsinki; since Finland closed the border and the international trains stopped, Vyborg is no longer a crossing point on the way to Finland.

Vyborg's best-known food is the Vyborg kringle, or viipurinrinkeli in Finnish, a regional form of the twisted kringle known in the town since the 15th century. Its origin is credited to the Franciscan friars who settled here in the 14th century and kept the recipe secret; the kringle was eaten after fasts, given to the poor and sold to pay for repairs to the friary. It is shaped like a figure of eight with the ends laid across the middle, has a dark brown crust, a soft yellowish crumb coloured with turmeric, and a distinctive spiced, crisp and rich taste.

The kringle gave Vyborg the nickname of the Kringle Town. After 1710 it reached the imperial court in St Petersburg, and in the 19th century two baking families, the Vaittinens and the Löppönens, fought a long rivalry over it, remembered as the Kringle War; Mrs Löppönen's kringles won a gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition of 1900, though supporters of the Vaittinens had the award overturned. After the wars of 1939–44 the Finnish bakers moved production to Lappeenranta, and the kringle is now sold across Finland, while in Russia the Vyborg kringle is registered as a geographical indication.

Eating out otherwise follows Russian habits in restaurants around the Old Town, alongside Scandinavian-style cooking. The market hall by the Round Tower sells fruit and vegetables and many products brought over from Finland, and the Round Tower itself has served as a restaurant since 1938.