The Scandinavian beauty, Finland, has many ethnographic museums, especially open-air ones. Each of them is dedicated to a specific region or a specific historical period. They comprise the old estates of wealthy citizens or small traditional huts of villagers. And there is only one museum that occupies almost an entire island, one of the most picturesque places of the Finnish capital, Helsinki.

The fabulous island of Seurasaari is connected to the mainland by an ancient wooden bridge built at the end of the 19th century. In the very center of the bridge, there is a charming gazebo decorated with snow-white carvings by the famous architect Fridtjof Mieritz. It also has a small Norwegian-style forester's house, visible right over the bridge. Constructions of this type (when the upper floor seems to hang above the lower floor) were the architect's hallmark. Similar buildings by Fridtjof Mieritz can be found in other countries. For example, the master erected several beautiful mansions in the modest Northern Art Nouveau style in St. Petersburg, Russia.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the open-air ethnographic museum of the same name was founded on the island of Seurasaari. Monuments of wooden architecture were brought here from all over Finland. All the local buildings were once inhabited by real people. The only artificially created part of the museum is the primitive settlement with ancient huts-dugouts

In addition to residential buildings, you can see an old watermill with an unusual horizontal wheel and a wooden barn that resembles a fairy-tale witch's hut. This invention kept the grain safe from small hungry rodents and prevented the wood from rotting. The barn is the oldest exhibit in the Seurasaari Museum. There are also wooden windmills, farms of wealthy peasants with barns and stables, and even a medieval church dating from the 17th century. The church still holds services, as it did many centuries ago.