The story
On a granite hill above the centre of Turku stands a building that looks more like a small castle than a gallery. The architect Gustaf Nyström, who also designed the House of the Estates in Helsinki, finished it in 1904, and it was only the second building in Finland put up specifically as a museum.
Inside hangs one of the best-known images of Finnish national art. In The Defense of the Sampo, painted in 1896 by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, the hero Väinämöinen swings his sword at the witch Louhi, who has turned into a giant bird to win back the Sampo, a magic mill of plenty from the Kalevala, Finland's national epic. Gallen-Kallela painted it in tempera, in the years when Finnish artists were turning to their own myths and landscapes.
The collection belongs to the Turku Art Society, a private association founded in 1891, which still runs the museum. Its holdings follow Finnish art from that turn-of-the-century golden age through Finnish surrealism and pop art, along with a notable group of self-portraits by Finnish artists.
