Kappeli

This afternoon the Professor and I had the chance to have lunch at Helsinki's famous restaurant Kappeli. We were invited to dinner by Terhi who is the head of Fulbright Finland.

Kappeli actually means chapel so that in all of the translations to English that we have seen it is called chapel. I prefer thinking of it by its Finnish name. Kappeli sounds so much better. This Helsinki landmark was originally opened in 1867. I has gone through several incarnations before emerging as the beautiful partially glass structure that it is today. It sits just opposite a modern "band stand" in the park and therefore in the summer this is the center for much of the night time entertainment.

One of the items of history that has pride of place at Kappeli is that it used to be the center for Finnish artists to gather. I particularly like this story from Kappeli's history:

Sibelius is in Stockholm

Took place in the chapel, and took place. Perhaps the most famous report, A fairly large number of artists: Aho, Järnefelt, Leino, Sibelius and Gallen-Kallela, among others, were sitting, as usual, the chapel when the Sibelius had to leave for a couple of days in Stockholm to do batch composition.when he returned to his business trip, had the same mass the size of the chapel remains. Some artists then blurted out: "Hear, Janne, you are either outdoors or indoors, but you do not ramppaa those doors."

For those of you who are not fluent in translations from anything to English, the punch line of the story is that when Sibelius returned after his journey to Sweden, he found the same group of friends, sitting a the same table at Kappeli. One of the artist blurted out: "Listen here, Janne, either you stay outside or stay inside, but stop coming in and out all of the time."