St Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373) founded the Bridgettine order, and in 1438 the Swedish Privy Council decided that Finland should have a house of it. The first site, at Karinkylä in Masku, did not work. The Ailonen farm in Raisio was donated instead and the king confirmed the new location on 23 August 1443 — the date the town of Naantali counts as its founding. The convent went up on Ailostenniemi, a peninsula surrounded by water, and was consecrated in 1462 by Bishop Konrad Bitz; the church itself was built in roughly 1460–1480 and work continued on the house to the end of the century.
It was a double convent in the Bridgettine pattern: separated communities of nuns and brothers under one rule, on one site. The town grew up to serve it, and when the convent went the town’s economy collapsed into three centuries of knitting socks. Accounts of the ending differ slightly and both are worth knowing: Visit Naantali dates the end of convent activity to 1544, while the city’s own history says the crown confiscated church and convent property at the Reformation and monastic life declined gradually through the later 1500s.
The church is all that is left. Every other convent building has gone; the church became, and remains, the parish church, and it is the second-largest medieval stone church in Finland after Turku Cathedral. In the entrance hall there is a model of the convent as it stood on Ailostenniemi, which is the only way now to see the rest of the house. The interior was built for sung liturgy and the acoustics are the thing people remark on.
Be clear about the silhouette. The tower that gives Naantali its skyline from the guest harbour is baroque, completed in 1797, and it is not medieval. The medieval building is the grey stone body underneath it. The most recent renovation was in 2011–12 under the architect Virpi Tervonen, covering lighting, interior windows, the altar and some of the textiles.
Naantali is about 15 km west of Turku and inside the Föli regional transport area, so ordinary regional buses run out to it. The church is at Nunnakatu 1, above the wooden old town.
