Holidays in Aland Islands

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Aland Islands

Twenty Minutes, Then Seven Weeks

On 1 May 1921, Finland abandoned the old Helsinki-based mean time it had used for civil purposes and adopted Eastern European Time, standardized on the 30th meridian east. Official Finnish sources put the change with unusual precision: at midnight, clocks were moved forward twenty minutes and roughly eleven seconds. Fewer than eight weeks later, on 24 June 1921, the League of Nations in Geneva settled a separate and much larger question. Despite a petition signed by well over ninety percent of participating islanders asking to rejoin Sweden, the archipelago would remain under Finnish sovereignty, compensated with a far-reaching charter of autonomy, demilitarization and language protection. The two decisions were legally unconnected, but between them, in the space of a single season, they fixed both which country's calendar the islands would keep and which country's clock.

The geography makes the outcome an odd fit. Mariehamn sits at roughly 19 degrees 56 minutes east, more than ten degrees short of the 30th meridian that defines Eastern European Time. At the standard four minutes of time per degree of longitude, the sun over the town reaches its highest point close to forty minutes after the clock indicates noon under winter standard time, a considerably larger gap than the one affecting Helsinki itself, which lies much nearer the reference meridian. A traveler arriving by ferry from Sweden crosses no meaningful change in the sun's position but gains a full hour on the clock the moment the vessel enters Ålandic waters.

The islands remain overwhelmingly Swedish speaking, and daily life, broadcasting and ferry traffic still run largely on Stockholm's rhythm, yet every public clock answers to Helsinki. It is a quiet, daily trace of a settlement that had nothing to do with the sun and everything to do with a League of Nations ruling handed down one early summer in 1921.

The Post That Could Not Keep a Timetable

In 1636 the Swedish crown, ruling a kingdom that then included Finland, ordered the creation of a regular postal service to bind its territories together, and in 1638 a route was opened running from Stockholm across the Sea of Åland to Turku and onward toward the eastern border. The Finnish Postal Museum, which has documented the route in detail, describes the 53 kilometre open-water crossing through the islands as one of the most hazardous mail routes ever operated in Europe. Selected peasant farmers, organized in teams and exempted from other crown duties in exchange for the work, carried the mailbag by boat and on foot, changing hands at post houses spaced twenty to thirty kilometres apart.

The schedule the crown demanded took little account of what the crossing actually involved. Postmen were required to travel "as quickly as anyone with urgent matters to attend to would", a pace fixed at roughly ten kilometres every two hours, with a threatened penalty of eight days in the stocks on bread and water for unexplained delay. A single relay could take anywhere from six to fifteen hours depending on distance and weather, slowest in February and late autumn, fastest in high summer, over a strait that froze unevenly and could just as easily swallow a rowing boat as trap it in pack ice. In the winter of 1710 to 1711, seventeen men from the parish of Eckerö alone lost their lives attempting the passage.

A stone post and customs house, designed in the 1820s by the architect Carl Ludvig Engel, still stands at Eckerö as a monument to the route's later importance under Russian rule, when the crossing became the western gateway for mail bound for Saint Petersburg. The relay finally ended in 1910, after 272 years of trying, and mostly failing, to hold a fixed timetable against an indifferent sea.

A Cup Measured in Days, Not Minutes

By the 1920s Mariehamn had become the home port of the last great fleet of commercial sailing ships anywhere in the world. Shipowner Gustaf Erikson built up dozens of iron and steel-hulled windjammers at a time when almost every other merchant fleet had converted to steam, and used them chiefly to carry grain from South Australia to Britain around Cape Horn. One of his ships, the four-masted barque Pommern, survives today as a preserved museum vessel in Mariehamn harbor, the only ship of its type still kept in original condition.

The Australia to England run became an unofficial annual contest among the captains, later formalized when a paint manufacturer began donating a silver cup for the fastest passage in 1928. Unlike the steamers that had already displaced sail on almost every other trade route, these ships carried no engines and depended on traditional celestial navigation, fixing their position with sextant and chronometer much as ocean-going sailing ships had for two centuries. The measure of success was not clock precision but elapsed days at sea: the fastest recorded passage, by the barque Parma in 1933, took 83 days, while a "good" crossing was judged as anything under a hundred.

The trade peaked in 1939, when thirteen windjammers gathered to load grain off Port Victoria in South Australia, all but two of them flying Erikson's colours. The Second World War scattered and sank much of the fleet, and after the war only two ships, Pamir and Passat, made a final pair of grain voyages in 1949, closing a competition whose currency, uniquely among the entries in this record, was never the minute but the day.

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