Having endured six months of winter, is it any wonder the Finns are dazzled by summer? David Brown is swept along by the mother of all seasonal celebrations

There is a well-known, and almost certainly untrue, story of a foreign visitor stumbling upon the Vappu festival in Helsinki one year. ‘Does this happen every weekend?’ he reportedly spluttered, amazed at the sight of a 100,000 champagne-fuelled Finns lazing in the sun.

‘No, of course not,’ the Finn is alleged to have answered, ‘some weekends there are a lot of people.’

In reality, Vappu comes only once a year, and that is on 1 May. While it is a public holiday – which starts the night before, on May Day’s eve, also known as Walpurgis Night – across much of Europe, only in Finland have the festivities exploded into a national carnival of joy and excess, a day on which people who have spent six months hibernating come out to blink at the sun, admire the leaves on the trees and bask like sea lions sprung from a chilly ocean.

During it, the Finns seem almost giddy with relief, knowing that another arduous winter has been overcome, and that it is months before cold and darkness become a consuming feature of everyday life again.

Vappu also marks the beginning of a three-month season of barbeques, weekends at lakeside summer cottages and evenings that never seem to end beneath the midnight sun. For the six weeks that separate Vappu from Juhannus (Midsummer’s Day), the country buzzes with life: late night parties, the Ice Hockey World Championships and music festivals – Hämeenlinna Opera, Pori Jazz and several rock events.

Vappu festivities begin in earnest at 6pm on 30 April, when university faculties take turns ‘capping’ the statue of Havis Amanda, a bronze art nouveau nude that symbolises Helsinki’s rebirth, located near the market square. The placing of the white cap on her head, involving anything from hot air balloons to cranes, sparks a night of parties and celebrations – but this is only the entrée for the main event the next morning.

People start arriving in the Kaivopuisto park from as early as 7am, setting up picnic tables, uncorking bottles of champagne and dishing out plates of salad and grilled sausages. Children and those in charge of motor vehicles drink sima, a lemon mead, and snack on tippaleipä, a funnel cake that looks like deep-fried spaghetti and tastes of nothing much at all.

Activity focuses on a small hill in the centre of the park, which offers a panoramic view of the Gulf of Finland. By 11am the crowd numbers 50,000 and continues to grow throughout the late morning and early afternoon, so that the streets for kilometres in every direction are crowded with people waving balloons, decorating themselves with streamers and consuming enough sparkling wine to irrigate the Sahara.

The history of Vappu is lost in antiquity. ‘There is a pagan aspect to it, going back to the Medieval era and celebrating the beginning of spring,’ says Professor Jason Lavery, research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, ‘and certainly a Central European Christian tradition of celebrating St Bertha, an early Christian martyr.

‘More recently we have the rise of May Day as a day celebrating workers’ rights, which dates from the 1880s and comes from the US, although ironically enough, the US now marks workers’ rights in September.

‘It seems that in Europe it was felt that people were celebrating at that time of year anyway, so they could piggyback on those traditions. And there seems to have been a parallel development when it also became a day of celebration for students, which began at the beginning of the 20th century right across Scandinavia. Vappu is a very Scandinavian [take on] May Day.

‘More recently there have also been Christian marches, so it’s really a day where no matter what part of the population you are from, you can find a way to connect to it. It’s a very inclusive celebration.’

One of the most startling features of Vappu is what people wear. Almost everyone is sporting their white, black-brimmed cap that resembles a sailor’s. And anyone under 25 is likely to be wearing brightly coloured overalls, covered with patches and company logos.

‘Wearing the uniforms is fairly new,’ says Lavery. ‘But the roots of that go deeper, back to the medieval era, where you’d have parades in major European cities where all the members of the guilds would dress up in various outfits. Prior to the 1960s when universities were smaller, students were organised into student unions representing certain regions, each of which had its own colour.’

Since the 1980s, all university and polytechnic faculties have had their own colours – so that a healthcare student from Kuopio would wear yellow, while an engineering student from Espoo would wear forest green. That said, it has become popular for students to mix and match – cutting off the leg of their pink overall, for example, and swapping it with the leg of a red uniform from a friend in another faculty.

Internationally, May Day is associated with the workers’ movement, however, in Finland the numbers attending marches have dropped markedly since their heyday in the 1970s. ‘That’s partially because of lifestyle,’ says Mika Ojakangas, a research fellow in political sciences. ‘People no longer go on marches – even if they are workers. People have become more individualistic. The image of Vappu as a workers’ day is that it is organised by unions and political parties [is something that] young people find difficult to relate to. Even young people who are left wing are more interested in the environment and the Third World, and don’t really see Vappu as fitting into that. Especially those born in the 1960s, who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, feel disillusioned by socialism, and have become more interested in doing other things.’

Even for those not tempted into the city to celebrate en masse, Vappu means a lot. ‘It’s a time to spring clean the house,’ Johanna, a Helsinki local, tells me. ‘Friends and neighbours are always dropping by, so everything should look nice. It’s a day to put on a nice new dress and fire up the grill.’

‘And you have to have balloons and streamers everywhere,’ her friend Minna adds. ‘As a child I always had balloons, so I always want my kids to have balloons too.’

Where Vappu is urban and social, Midsummer is rural and tranquil. It is a time to get out of the city and into a lakeside cottage; to enjoy a sauna and go swimming, to spark up the barbeque and have a glass of red wine on the deck. It is also a time to build huge bonfires – a continuation of a pagan tradition designed to frighten off demons.

With Finnish summers longer and warmer than they used to be, the season has extended well past Midsummer and even into early September. City parks are full every evening with people practising Capoeira, enjoying picnics, or just sleeping under a tree, and every self-respecting bar and café in town boasts a terassi, a terrace, with the atmosphere of the Riviera, if not the view.

Anyone who has spent a winter in Finland will know well why summer is so cherished. With temperatures dropping as low as -25°C, and with only five or six hours of murky daylight, Finns enjoy summer with a delight bordering on the manic.

‘There is a bacchanalian element to Vappu. That whole aspect of the day is something which has a real cultural value for us,’ says Professor Mika Ojakangas of Helsinki University. ‘It’s about turning the social hierarchy upside down, about the people at the bottom having a day that is theirs. In Italy, for instance, there isn’t this kind of celebration. Maybe that is because Italians are not as depressed and repressed as we Finns are. So they don’t need to experience this eruption, this sense of release that we do. They live like this all year around – we only do this one day a year.’

Vappu is celebrated on 1 May each year. The biggest gatherings are in the city centre on the evening of 30 April, and in the Helsinki city parks of Kaisaniemi and Kaivopuisto the following day.

Juhannus takes place between 20 and 26 June, and is best celebrated out of the major cities, at one of the 66,000 lakes around the country.

There are more than 500 terassi in Helsinki alone, but classic examples are cafés Strindberg or Esplanad on Helsinki’s Esplanadi, or Café Ursula near Kaivopuisto.

Favourite picnic spots in the city include the park adjoining Linnanmäki funpark, Kaivopuisto park and around Töölönlahti Bay.