Helsinki Market Square

This guide to Helsinki Market Square follows the uproar over Havis Amanda, the bronze mermaid fountain cast in Paris in 1906 by sculptor Ville Vallgren and unveiled here before dawn on the twentieth of September, 1908. It traces the backlash from Finland's first female MPs, nationalists and workers' newspapers who called the nude statue indecent, foreign and wasteful. Stung by the criticism, Vallgren wrote back from Paris that a sea nymph rising from the waves could hardly be expected to wear clothes.