The majority of Oulu’s culture is international in origin. The crucial points have been the wars, especially those in which the issue was whether the town belonged to the east or the west, to Sweden or Novgorod, to the sphere of the western church or the eastern church. At one time raiders were attracted to the town by its natural resources, and later by its geopolitically strategic location. Since the west came out on top, Oulu is what it is now: a mixture of the cultural traditions of the continent of Europe, the Nordic Countries and Ostrobothnia.

The town’s lifeline over the centuries, the Oulu River, has been an excellent approach route for both traders and exterminators. Sometimes there was not much difference between the two, as one summer’s Russian pedlar might well come back the following year as guide to the invading troops. But it was also possible to travel up the river. If they were incited enough, the men of Ostrobothnia were quite likely to hit back, with clubs if the king refused to provide any other weapons. War followed war and retaliation followed retaliation throughout the Middle Ages.

It was this vicious circle of retaliation that brought Oulu into being, in fact. When the Karelians killed 400 Finns around Lake Oulujärvi in 1555, King Gustav Vasa ordered 200 men to go to Oulu to exact retribution for the deed. Nothing came of the expedition, but the troops left an arsenal of weapons on the island of Linnansaari so that the local farmers would have something better than their bare hands if the need arose. This was the first time that Oulu had been a strategic military base.

A little later the kings of Sweden, which had swelled to become a Major Power, started developing grand plans for the north. Oulu was to become a bridgehead for conquests on the coasts of the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean. The Treaty of Stolbova in 1617 held more tempting prospects, however, which Sweden was unable to resist, and all ideas of inhabiting the barren north were abandoned. But a castle had been built at Oulu by that time, and a town has been founded beside it, so that the throb of urban life gained a cosmopolitan flavour from the soldiers of the Swedish garrison.

In spite of the many times that Finland, and Oulu in particular, had clashed head on with the Russians, the period of Russian rule became the longest time of peace in the town’s history. The area was spared the ravages of war for more than a hundred years; no battles, no cannon fire, very little killing and no intentional burning of property, apart from when the English shot the harbour, the tar exchange and part of the town to pieces in 1854, during the Crimean War.

The approach of the Russian revolution brought unrest to Oulu once again, beginning with the secret political journeys of V.I.Lenin and some of the other revolutionaries.

Oulu’s geographical position had now changed somewhat. Where earlier people came from the east and went towards the west, or the other way round, now the axis was in a north-south direction. The railway connection between St.Petersburg and Stockholm via Oulu became all the more important when the sea routes were blocked, and the First World War made the town a place of strategic significance for the first time in 300 years. Russian troops were sent to the western front by this route, and military equipment was brought from the Arctic Ocean by horse and by reindeer for delivery to St.Petersburg.

The people of Oulu were divided into two camps, the Germanists and the Tsarists. Some remained faithful to Mother Russia, and some set off for Germany to train as Jaegers. Oulu was the main recruiting base for the latter, and the majority of the volunteers then travelled north into Sweden and from there to Germany.

After the war the town was strategically important from a communications point of view, and when the Winter War broke out the enemy was passionately desirous of reaching Oulu, for it is at this latitude that the territory of Finland is at its narrowest and can be most easily divided in two. This is what the Soviet army planned to do, but the troops dispatched against them from Oulu stopped their advances in Kainuu, at Suomussalmi and Kuhmo. The history of retaliation repeated itself once more in the many bombing raids made on the town in the following years.

The military significance of Oulu has been understood in little snatches in the places where the decisions have been made. Under Swedish rule troops were sent here if needed, but usually arrived too late. The Russian garrison and gendarmes were certainly on hand to order the citizens of Oulu about, until they disappeared, archives and all, in the confusion of the war years. The Ostrobothnian Jaeger Battalion that had been founded to defend Finland’s newly acquired independence was disbanded in the 1930’s, until a division was suddenly needed to frustrate the attempts to divide the country in two when the Winter War broke out. For most of the Continuation War Oulu was a German garrison town, and later, in peacetime, it housed one of the main Finnish army garrisons, until that period, too, came to an end in 1998, when it was decided — once again — to demilitarize the town.

If anyone can create any consistent military policy doctrine out of this history, good for them!

Oulu has also received refugees, evacuees, or whatever you might choose to call them, escaping from the atrocities of war elsewhere. When the Great Wrath began shortly after 1710, herds of refugees arrived from Southern Finland and Ingria, but the war, too, reached here soon afterwards, so that the local people joined the stream of the homeless and the town was almost emptied of population.

The Russians captured Oulu in 1714, but did nothing to destroy it. They burned down the castle, but that was no great loss as it was almost in ruins anyway. About 60 people were taken prisoner and disappeared to Russia somewhere.

The events of the Great Wrath repeated themselves in the 1920’s, although this time without the people of Oulu having to flee. That was the time when people dreamed of a Greater Finland, and many refugees came from the area of Karelia around the White Sea. These people were in worse condition that their ancestors who had come as pedlars, for they were frostbitten, covered in lice, diseased, hungry and homesick. Fortunately the sawmill industry and the log-floating that went with it were flourishing and were in need of employees who would work hard for them like Comrade Stakhanov out of pure spite for the Soviet system.

Oulu received another 1 100 evacuees during the Second World War, far more than at any later time or later place.