For six hundred years this was the square. From the founding of the town in the 13th century until the early 19th it was Turku’s marketplace, its traffic hub and its administrative centre, with the cathedral closing the eastern end. The Great Fire of 1827 took it. The northern blocks were never rebuilt at all — they became Porthan’s Park — and everything standing today is post-fire or later, which is exactly why the square reads as a calm neoclassical space rather than a medieval one.
Four buildings are named as the historic ones, and their dates tell the story plainly. Brinkkala Mansion: a town house is recorded on the plot from the 16th century, and the building was overhauled in 1884–86, when the wooden balcony was added to its front. The Old Town Hall site was the town’s administrative centre from the 14th century; Samuel Berner’s stone town hall of 1736 was destroyed in 1827, and what replaced it was later bought by the factory owner Juselius and rebuilt as a three-storey factory in 1899. Hjelt Mansion was built by Captain Hjelt in 1830 in a St Petersburg empire style. Juselius Mansion is the newest, put up in 1892. All four have been restored and are now cultural venues.
The oldest thing on this square is not a building. The Declaration of Christmas Peace has been proclaimed in Turku for roughly seven hundred years, since the 1300s, and read from that Brinkkala balcony since 1886. On 24 December at 12:00 the city’s chief of protocol steps out and reads it in Finnish and Swedish; it takes about two and a half minutes and follows a form fixed in 1903. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people stand on the square to hear it — about 18,000 in 2022 — and it has been broadcast live on television since 1983.
The other date is late June. The Turku Medieval Market has filled this square and the streets around it for four days on the weekend after Midsummer since 1996, free to enter. In winter the square becomes the Christmas Market.
On any other day: five minutes, on the way down the river to Aboa Vetus, which is where the medieval town actually is.
