 Oulu has always been an international region. It was created
as such on that warm August day in 3321 BC when the first
speck of land on which it now stands popped up from beneath
the sea. During the great summer that we know as the Stone
Age, the international aspect was the climate, which was
similar to that of Paris nowadays. Badgers tunnelled into
the hillside on Sankivaara, and the warm winds swished
through the maple trees in the forests of Hangaskangas.
It was another thousand years before the climate of Oulu
settled at the temperatures that we associate with the north
nowadays. Oulu is in the north, we can’t deny this fact. But
not so far north that we can write off the other directions.
The first and most natural of these is the East. It is
from there that the sun rises and the land begins to descend,
from the rolling hills of Kainuu and Karelia down to sea
level. First of all it was the water that set out on this
downward journey, then the trace elements carried in it, and
finally man, of the solid, resilient Finno-Ugric kind. These
were the same people who also migrated further north, into
Lapland.
The second direction was south, from where other people
came to collect taxes, and to which our people went to trade
their wares, long before they dared to set out over the
great seas to the west.
People dreamed about the North, too, on many occasions,
and sometimes went there, but it is only in recent years
that north has become an important direction again, or at
least the Northern Dimension, as the eurocrats call it. Oulu
also provides a link in that direction – a gateway to the
Arctic Ocean and the Barents Region.
Many people have come to Oulu from all points of the
compass and set out to all points of the compass. It makes a
good base. The very first inhabitants realised that this was
a suitable place to stop and rest; the place where the East
and the downhill part of the journey came to an end and the
West loomed on the opposite shore, over the flat sea. There
was enough game to be had, the waters were full of fish and
money hopped from branch to branch in the trees on the backs
of squirrels.
The primordial aliens in the lean days of the Iron Age
were the other Finnish tribes, from Satakunta, Häme, Karelia
and Savo. And very welcome they were too. After all, the
journey had taken them far longer than it takes nowadays to
come from Oulu’s most distant twin town, Bursa in Turkey.
Some of them even settled here, and we, the inhabitants of
today, are their descendants.
The later visitors came from progressively further away:
first from Karelia, Russia and Sweden, then from Central
Europe, and nowadays from almost everywhere under the sun.
There is no definite proof yet of anyone from Mars, even
though there were reports of UFOs almost every other day in
the 1960s. But there is plenty of technology born in Oulu on
board the satellites that are being sent to Mars. |
