Narva Town Hall: The Winter the Finns Came
Reveal the soldiers lined up before the Town Hall in January 1919 — and discover how they reached Narva across the sea and the river ice.
The story
Look at the men lined up in front of the staircase: fur hats, grey greatcoats, a pale sheepskin coat, a sabre, grounded rifles. Behind them rises the portal of Narva Town Hall, its stone figures dark above the door. The photograph, taken in January 1919, is kept in a Finnish archive, because these soldiers are Finns — volunteers who crossed the gulf to fight in Estonia's War of Independence.
They had reached Narva only days earlier, and not by road. On the seventeenth of January a small Estonian fleet under Johan Pitka began landing about a thousand men at Utria, west of Narva; some six hundred were Finnish volunteers under Major Martin Ekström. The next day, at twenty past five in the evening, the first Finnish company under Captain Anto Eskola entered the city from the north, along the river ice. Around six o'clock they reached this square and set up machine guns here and at the road bridge.
Open Narva Town Hall in WanderTrails
Walk to the real viewpoint, raise your camera, align the guide with today's view — and watch the past appear over the present, with the full audio story in English, Estonian, or Russian.
