Helsinki

Helsinki’s grand seaside cemetery, opened in 1829 on a sandy peninsula on the western shore, where the nation buries its presidents, artists and generals. Marshal Mannerheim lies under a granite slab at the heart of the military section, ringed by rows of war dead from the Winter and Continuation Wars and a memorial to the fallen of 1918. Tree-lined, weather-worn and solemn.

Best shot The tree-lined avenue of monumental tombs in low winter light.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A busy downtown green that sits on a mass grave. During the plague of 1710, which killed around two-thirds of Helsinki, the dead were buried here, and the city has called it Ruttopuisto, the Plague Park, ever since. Engel’s Old Church of 1826 still stands among the trees, and a plaque by the gate records the year. People eat lunch on the dead.

Best shot The Old Church behind bare trees; the plague plaque by the Annankatu gate.

• Quiet

A Lutheran church of 1969 blasted straight into a granite outcrop, its walls left as raw fractured bedrock under a shallow copper dome ringed with skylights, so the daylight rakes across the stone. Cave-like, primal and acoustically vast. Mobbed by day, so come at opening.

Best shot The raw blasted granite walls under the copper dome.

• Touristy

The largest Orthodox cathedral in Western Europe, finished in 1868 on a rocky hilltop: thirteen gilded onion domes over a dark red-brick mass and a dim, icon-heavy interior. Its Slavic silhouette is the brooding Eastern answer to the white Lutheran cathedral across the water.

Best shot The red-brick front and gilded domes against an overcast sky.

• Touristy

A curved, windowless chapel of oiled spruce on a busy shopping square, built in 2012 to hold no services at all, only silence. The thick timber walls seal out the city, and a hidden skylight is the only light. Coffin-still and oddly holy. Step in from the noise and sit.

Best shot The smooth windowless timber shell rising over Narinkka Square.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A sea fortress begun in 1748 across a cluster of islands, laced with dark tunnels, bastions and powder magazines, its baroque King’s Gate rising straight out of the water. After 1918 it held a civil war prison camp where more than a thousand Red prisoners died of hunger and disease. Take the ferry, and read the plaques. Fog helps.

Best shot The King’s Gate archway rising from the sea wall, in fog.

• Solo-friendly

Engel’s white neoclassical cathedral of 1852 over Senate Square, green-domed and flanked by apostles at the top of a great flight of steps. The reason to bother when it is this photographed is underneath: a low brick-vaulted crypt, once a storeroom, now a chapel, open in the summer months. Skip the steps, go down.

Best shot The white facade and green dome from Senate Square.

• Touristy

Eila Hiltunen’s monument to the composer Sibelius, unveiled in 1967: a wave of more than six hundred hollow steel pipes welded into something between a pipe organ and a fused ruin, meant to sing in the wind. A separate steel cast of his face stares out from the rock beside it, added when critics revolted against the abstraction. Corroding, strange, mausoleum-like.

Best shot The mass of welded pipes against the sky, or the staring metal face.

• Solo-friendly

A hotel inside the nineteenth-century Helsinki County Prison, its forbidding brick-gothic ranges used as a jail until 2002. The conversion kept the thick cell-block walls, the barred corridors and the perimeter wall, so you sleep in a made-over cell behind real prison brick. Genuinely macabre, and the best story of any hotel in the city.

• Adults only

A small hotel in a landmark 1903 Jugendstil building first built as a students’ union, National Romantic detailing drawn from the Kalevala, with Art Nouveau frescoes, wood beams and vaulted, almost medieval rooms. Full of period character in the middle of the city.

• Adults only

Finland’s first skyscraper, opened in 1931, a stack of Jugend, Art Deco and Functionalist floors with a slightly noir past that takes in wartime intelligence work. Its top-floor Ateljee bar of 1951 is one of the oldest panoramic bars in town. Atmospheric and thoroughly of its era.

• Adults only

A design hotel built around a granite, castle-like Art Nouveau building of 1903, one of the great National Romantic piles in the city, its stone front bristling with carved detail and the old wing keeping its arched, vaulted rooms. In the Design District.

• Adults only

A Helsinki institution barely touched since it opened in 1934, the dining room ruled by a 1970 twin-seahorse mural and decades of honest wear. Fried Baltic herring, cabbage rolls, and the feeling of eating inside the city’s memory. Long beloved by writers, and worth it.

• Adults only

A restaurant, café and bar of 1867 in an ornate glass-and-iron pavilion at the end of the Esplanadi, restored a couple of years ago, with atmospheric vaulted cellar rooms below the main hall. A long-standing haunt of the city’s artists and bohemians.

• Adults only

A dim speakeasy-style cocktail bar behind heavy blackout curtains, its apothecary-like room open since 2012 and known for theatrical, inventive drinks. Hidden-den mood, serious mixing. Find the door.

• Adults only

A small, deliberately dark cocktail bar done in inky tiles and deep banquettes, forty seats lit low for a Nordic-noir hush. A design-led take on the prohibition hideaway, and one of the moodiest drinks in the centre.

• Adults only

The oldest and most cult dive bar in gritty, bohemian Kallio, trading on cheap beer and an unpretentious crowd. Rough at the edges and open long hours, a genuine working-class den, not a themed one.

• Adults only

A black-metal record shop and label with four thousand-plus titles of extreme music on vinyl, tape and CD, the room painted black and hand-marked with Lovecraftian sigils, an old church altar repurposed as the sales counter. In the most metal country on earth, this is its darkest, most committed record shop.

• Solo-friendly

An old-school record store of thirty-five years with thirty thousand new and second-hand records, heavy on rock, metal, prog, blues and jazz, crates and record-lined walls in every direction. A deep, dusty dig into Finland’s heavy-music heritage.

• Solo-friendly

A serious antiquarian bookshop dealing in rare and out-of-print Finnish books, art and architecture, and one of the few places in the country for old maps, engravings and early poster art. Glass cabinets, book-laden tables and a globe. Hushed and proper.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A central family-run second-hand bookshop trading in fact and fiction across several languages, good for the rare and the obscure, its arched front lettered in gold with bargain baskets out on the pavement. A cosy, browsable old-city divari.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A vintage clothing shop since 1987 that sells nothing made after the 1970s, from century-old garments to unopened 1950s lingerie, mannequins in tiaras and gowns among crammed racks and cases of old jewellery. For a macabre-romantic wardrobe, this is the place.

• Solo-friendly