Tourism and identity politics in the Helsinki churchscape

Abstract

Religious sites are popular tourist attractions, mainly because they are place-specific landmarks that mediate conceptions about history and identity. This is evident in Helsinki, Finland, where churches are among the most popular tourist sites. A content analysis of 366 tourism brochure images covering a period from 1852 to 2000 was conducted in order to examine the identity-political underpinnings of those churches in the context of tourism. The churches of Helsinki have supported identity construction at various geographical scales that range from the (inter)national down to the individual. They have also mediated hegemonic conceptions of Finnishness between these scales. The churches have contributed to the social construction of bounded communities by conceptualizing Lutheranism as part of mainstream Finnishness in contrast to the Orthodox religion, which has been associated with Russia. At the local scale, churches have crystallized the essence of Helsinki and its neighborhoods and set the stage on which tourists’ bodily performances have taken place. Knowledge about the visualization and identity-political underpinnings of religious infrastructure elucidates the processes through which religious sites become conceived as historically and culturally important landscape elements. This knowledge enriches understanding about the transformation of religious sites into resources for tourism. The multifaceted role of religious tourist sites in the reproduction of socio-spatial identities and territories highlights the value of the concept of ‘everyday nationalism’ that combines banal and politicized cases of nationalism.

Keywords:

• Finland
• Helsinki
• religious sites
• churches
• landscape
• churchscape
• identity construction
• nation-building
• tourism images

Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Pauliina Raento, Daniel Knudsen, Leila Koivunen, Gareth Rice, Heli Ponto, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism that helped me to improve earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the City of Helsinki and the Kone Foundation for supporting my research and the staff of the National Library of Finland and the Helsinki City Archives for their personal help with this project.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Salla Emilia Jokela

Salla Jokela is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki. Her dissertation examines the use of tourism images in nation-building in Finland. This paper is part of the Academy of Finland research project ‘Landscape, Icons, and Images’ (1123561).