Old Church Park

This guide to Old Church Park in Helsinki opens with a mismatch: more than ten thousand people buried beneath the lawn, but only forty-eight gravestones to count. It traces the plague of 1710, which killed nearly twelve hundred people in a town of under three thousand and left the poor of Kamppi in unmarked pits, then jumps a century ahead to two young Finns, sculptor Elias Ilkka and architect Erik Bryggman, handed the very different problem of honoring soldiers killed retaking Helsinki in 1918. Listen for how their black-granite memorial borrows imagery straight from the Parthenon frieze.