The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The magical country with eight seasons
Sarah Marshall heads to the Arctic Circle to discover the charms of tjaktjagiesse – an extraordinary time in the unique Sami calendar
Seeing clearly in a forest requires a special type of vision. Staring through row upon row of pencil-thin birch and pine trees, it took some time to adjust my eyes and find the hidden treasure. Scattered between leaves glinting like gold coins, precious amber chanterelles sprouted in clusters.
It’s been a bumper season for mushrooms in the Nordics due to mild weather and heavy summer rainfall. Bypassing pretty-but-poisonous destroying angels and fairy-tale polka-dotted fly agarics, nature guide Pasi Kainulainen helped me forage the best of Lapland’s early-autumn harvest. Bilberries and Santa-red lingonberries were in abundance too.
Finns are intuitively in tune with nature – it’s embedded in their DNA – which is why they plan their kitchen calendar according to the seasons. But in the northern homeland of the Sami, the last true indigenous people of Europe, that timetable is a little more complex than the one most of us are used to.
“Up here there are eight seasons, because nature changes so quickly,” declared Pasi, as we reached Tuulijarvi, a lake brimming with Arctic char. Alongside our traditional four seasons, Sami people register the transitional periods in between, Pasi explained. Known in their language as dalvve (winter), gidadalvve (spring-winter), gida (spring), gidagiesse (spring-summer), giesse (summer), tjaktjagiesse (autumnsummer), tjaktja (autumn) and tjaktjadalvve (autumn-winter). For Sami, a people with an inextricable bond to their land and environment, seasons are a metronome, guiding the rhythm of life – and it is during these transitional periods that the pulse of nature is at its strongest, offering the most authentic, visceral window into their culture and tradition.
But of all these seasons, it is during tjaktjagiesse, which was creeping towards its end when I arrived in Inari, about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, that these traditions feel most innately linked to their natural surrounds. Having passed the equinox, the days were shrinking and the colours were changing. The forest glowed sunset pink, mosses rusted orange and leaves faded sepia like vintage Victorian photographs. This spectrum of farewell hues, celebrated as ruska, is my favourite time to visit the Nordics – a final blaze of glory before the year’s end.
Inari, a village of only a few hundred inhabitants, is the centre of Sami culture in Finland. In summer, the Ijahis Idja indigenous music festival is held here; in winter, art-house films are shown in a cinema made from snow. It’s also home to the Sami Parliament, where residents were voting for representatives when I arrived for a tour of the contemporary wooden and glass building opened in 2012. The government must consult them on any decisions impacting ancestral land, lakes and rivers, Pasi told me. Their biggest triumph to date was preventing the construction of an Arctic railroad across traditional herding grounds.
Although the Sami people have roots stemming back thousands of years, their political position has only strengthened in the last couple of decades. Once banned, the three Sami languages (Northern, Inari and Skolt), all taught in a school at the Parliament, are experiencing a revival.
Another major landmark was reached when the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki repatriated 2,200 Sami artefacts to the Siida Museum, which reopened with new interactive displays last summer. A ceremonial drum skin, a 5,000-year-old pair of wooden skis and a 1,000-year-old silver necklace found by a hiker in a nearby forest are among the exhibits.
Several items in the museum were retrieved from sacrificial sites on Ukonsaari, one of 3,000 islands in Lake Inari. Standing at the water’s edge, a few yards from my cabin at Wilderness Hotel Inari, I could just about make out its steep cliffs. “We love to go fishing or stay at our cabin in the lake during kevattalvi [the Finnish for gidadalvve],” mused lodge manager Essi Lappalainen.
Although a 30-minute walk from Inari village, the hotel was far enough away from light pollution to see the Northern Lights perform that night. With temperatures still about 7C, I stayed out for a few hours watching electromagnetic ribbons dance across the water, lying comfortably on the sand as displays reached a crescendo with an eruption of fireworks in the sky.
The following evening, I wasn’t so lucky, although an after-dark trip to an aurora hide-out overlooking rapids on the Juutua river was nevertheless entertaining. Using head torches to walk through the forest, we passed a mound of stones overgrown with lichens and ferns. The former Nazi bunker, used during the Lapland War between Finland and Germany in 1944, is a reminder that this area wasn’t always at peace. With the Russian border only 22 miles away, a dark shadow still hovers on the horizon.
“We still have national service in Finland,” sighed Pasi, as we sat around a fire waiting for the lights to (never) show. “If there’s another war, I’d be one of the first to get called up.” Sensing a chill in the air, we all leaned closer to the flames.
Snow can fall at any time in Lapland from mid-September onwards but is only officially registered when a white dusting reaches 1cm (less than half an inch) before 9am. Following days of sunshine and light rain, I woke up to a whiteout, proof it’s possible to experience all eight seasons in half as many days. Wrapped in extra layers, I braced for a chilly boat trip in Lemmenjoki, Finland’s largest national park.
A 40-minute drive from Inari, Sámi Nils-Heiki Paltto and his family run a craft store and operate activities in the park. “Every season, we have new work to do,” explained his mother Kaija, an accomplished textile artist, showing a pair of handmade reindeer boots and other handiwork. “We earmark the reindeer in July, slaughter them in September to make trousers before the hair gets too long, and prepare the leather when temperatures drop below one degree.”
After driving 10 miles along the Lemmonjoki river, we hiked through an old growth forest of waterfalls, mires and pine trees laden with wispy horsehair lichens to reach a hut where Nils had prepared a reindeer soup.
A man of few but meaningful words, with eyes bluer than ice, he saved his breath for “joiking”, a traditional form of Sami singing. His stirring song rippled across the water and rustled in the leaves, moving around us like the wind until the line between us and our natural surrounds seemed to blur.
“I joik for the river, when I’m herding reindeer or when I’m in the car,” he told us, laughing. “Because wherever you are at whatever time of year, it’s always nice to go home.”
Surrounded by sky and untouched wilderness, I got the impression he never had to travel far to get there.