The Arktikum Museum in Finnish Lapland

When you venture up to the town of Rovaniemi, deep in Finnish Lapland and just short of the Arctic Circle, you can’t be surprised to get a cold day now and again. Cold days are good opportunities to visit museums, and Rovaniemi’s Arktikum Museum is a great way to learn more about the region.

The building itself is magic – its special corridor looks something like a giant, glass-walled igloo. Its main purpose is to display and educate visitors about the traditions, culture and history of the people and life in the northern Arctic regions. Since the main part of the museum’s exhibits come under the title of the “Provincial Museum of Lapland and the Arctic Centre”, I wasn’t surprised to find information about fishing, building and basically surviving in the region, which was obviously especially harder a hundred or a thousand years ago. I had trouble surviving in the twenty-first century, with heating and thermal clothing! There were also displays of local animals and descriptions of how they survive (better than I did) and how people interact with nature. Traditional costumes and other artefacts from those who have lived in the area were also interesting.

The Artic Centre section features a cold room, simulating ice and snow, and a warmer room where you could watch a simulation of the Northern Lights. The Arktikum also has regularly changing temporary exhibitions, ranging from the local history of Rovaniemi to nature-focused specials on local animals.

On my visit, there were a few particular facts I picked up that have never left my mind since. One is that on average there are about 3000 collisions between cars and elk in Finland per year. As an Australian I know that it’s bad enough to collide with a kangaroo, but a towering elk is obviously going to do me (and him) a lot more damage. They have a stuffed elk on display so you can get a good sense of how big they are up close, without having to feel in danger! Another highlight was the language lesson in Inuktitut, basically a local Eskimo language. They have something like 25 different words for snow, each describing a different type of snowfall. It got me thinking that Australians should develop a whole set of words for describing sunny weather! Lapland is a fascinating area, and since it is so vastly different from most regions of the world, there’s a lot of unique things to learn – and I found the Arktikum Museum a great place to do this.