Who ruled Helsinki?

Helsinki occupies a rocky peninsula and scattered islands on the north shore of the Gulf of Finland, facing Tallinn across the water. It was founded as a trading town by the Swedish crown, stayed small for more than two centuries, and owes its rise to a decision of the Russian emperor, who made it the capital of a newly created Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812. Its centre is therefore largely a planned 19th-century city, and its modern history is that of a capital of an independent Finland from 1917.

Finland had been part of the Swedish realm since the Middle Ages, and its coast was settled by Swedish-speaking farmers and fishermen. In 1550 King Gustav Vasa of Sweden ordered the founding of Helsingfors at the mouth of the Vantaa River, hoping to draw Baltic trade away from Reval, the modern Tallinn. The town failed to flourish, and in 1640 it was moved a few kilometres south to the peninsula where its centre now stands. Plague killed much of its population in 1710, and during the Great Northern War Russian forces burned the town in 1713 and occupied Finland for several years.

After another Russian invasion in the 1740s, Sweden began building a great sea fortress on the islands off the harbour in 1748. Sveaborg, known in Finnish as Suomenlinna, brought soldiers, workers and money, and the town beside it grew. In the Finnish War of 1808 the fortress surrendered to Russia without a serious fight, and in 1809 Sweden ceded all of Finland to the Russian Empire.

Alexander I made Finland an autonomous grand duchy and in 1812 moved its capital from Turku to Helsinki, which was closer to St Petersburg and less tied to Swedish tradition. A fire in 1808 had already cleared space, and the planner Johan Albrecht Ehrenström and the architect Carl Ludvig Engel rebuilt the centre in a neoclassical style around Senate Square, with the Senate, the university and the great white church now known as Helsinki Cathedral. After a fire destroyed much of Turku in 1827, the university moved to Helsinki the following year. In the later 19th century railways, industry and the Finnish national movement turned the small administrative capital into the country's largest city.

Finland declared independence on 6 December 1917, after the Russian Revolution. In the civil war of 1918 the Reds held Helsinki until German troops, allied with the Whites, took it in April. During World War II Soviet aircraft bombed the city on the first day of the Winter War in November 1939, and again in heavy raids in February 1944, though most of it survived. Helsinki hosted the Summer Olympics in 1952 and, during the détente years of the Cold War, the 1975 conference that produced the Helsinki Final Act on European security. The city has nearly 700,000 people and about 1.5 million in its wider region, and is the political, economic and cultural centre of Finland.