Thursday Things of Interest II

 Let's continue our investigation on Finnish wars. In Finland we have a phrase "Ennen sotia", which means "Before the wars." And what does it actually, what are "the wars" the phrase refers to? I'm here to help you.

Finland declared independence on December 6th 1917, being an autonomic area of Russia before that. Finland didn't fight in the first world war. World War 1 is somewhat ignored in Finland. Of course we got our independence because of what happened during the war, but we were not part of it and our independence didn't need any battles or wars.

"The wars" in the phrase thus means the World War 2, which in Finland consists of three different wars (more of them in the later posts, I believe). These wars were Winter War, Continuation War and Lapland War which took time between 1939 and 1945. These are the wars Finland has fought in the history and these are the wars which are often referred in Finland. World War 2 had a siginificant effect on the whole world and how it works, lots of changes happened in Finland, too. Lots of things were different before the wars. For example the area Finland controlled was much larger and Finns were almost unbeaten in the long distance running (Paavo Nurmi, Ville Ritola, Hannes Kolehmainen and others).

I guess that in many (European) countries this "ennen sotia" period is called "interwar period", but in Finnish it is before the wars. This might cause some confusions, some one might think "before the wars" means time before the World War 1 & 2, but the Finnish expression refers to time perion 1917-1939.

Of course there were wars before the "before the wars", but the area Finland was then part of Sweden or Russia and they are different stories.

Before the wars Finland was allowed to have submarines, here is Vetehinen or "Merman."

--- In Other News ---

We have at least a handful of entries today. I'm taking my scout group to a sledding hill in the afternoon.