Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 210, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 August 1919 — QUAINT OLD FINNISH TOWN [ARTICLE]

QUAINT OLD FINNISH TOWN

Everything in B>rga Seems to G® Back to About the Earliest - Period of History. The first glimpse of Borga from the water is a cluster of old wooden buildings carelessly assembled along the skyline. You gather' that the town Is red. owing to the bulky, crimson-paint-ed packhouses in the foreground, but upon climbing up the steep, cobblestoned street to the town, you change your mind, and decide that it is going to be yellow. For all the funny, oldfashioned houses' are painted that color. A little farther on. however, it conies upon you suddenly that Borga possesses a color scheme —that all the red and yellow is just a background for the splendid, solemn of its ancient cathedral, which completely dominates the town from the depths of a walled courtyard of the type that was popular in the early fifteenth century.

Borga began about thirteen hundred and something, and must have reached its height about the seventeenth century, ,for it contains very little of a later date than that. The cathedral contains nothing more modern than ah organ, for example. Its white and gold pulpit was carved in the sixteenth century, and its wall sconces and worn derful crystal chandeliers are centuries old. Other Finnish towns have replaced their marvelous chandeliers with less beautiful practical fixtures of the current century, but Borga proudly upholds the past. The Borga cathedral still measures time by means of a quaint old hourglass filled with sand.

It was in this cathedral that the emperor of Russia. Aiexander I, received the oaths of allegiance of the newly conquered Finns, a few days after he had signed the constitution which gave them their The house in which the constitution was signed —a modest, little,* frame structure with old-fashioned, blue-painted blinds —is also pointed out with reverence to the traveler, and if you are duly sympathetic, the Borgans will then lead you, up to the site of an old fortress reported to date back to an obscure period, even before the cathedral, when the Finns were heathens. It must be admitted that this site is anything but impressive now. There are some peculiar ditches, which, one is assured, are moats, and several, barbwire fences which are supposed to inclose the ancient and venerable embattlements. Nevertheless, the place must have atmosphere, if you can only find it, for it was h’ere that Walter Runeberg, the great Finnish poet, used to find the inspiration for so many of his splendid songs.