MORNING

Tuesday would have been your first full day in Lappeenranta. On your way to the school building in the morning, you would have seen the first glimpses of the town:

Our school, the venerable Lappeenrannan Lyseo - or Hogwarts, as they say in student language - is a publicly funded upper secondary school that shares its facilities with the South Karelia IB World School and the Finnish-Russian School of Eastern Finland. We've been working in the same building at Lönnrotinkatu 3 since 1893:

We would have taken you around the premises and probably shown you two videos. Now you can only see the videos. The first one is the official one that can be shown to everybody; the second one is the 2020 edition of the annual Seniors' Video - or Abivideo in Finnish - that often is an honest and hilarious account of the past school year at Lyseo:

AFTERNOON

After lunch - we have kidney bean curry and chicken pasta bake at school today - you would also have been able to explore the town on foot:

Just like in the video, we would have taken you down to the passenger harbour and the fortress - satama and linnoitus in Finnish. It's easy to see on a map that Lappeenranta is located on the southern shore of Lake Saimaa, which is one of the largest inland waterway systems in the whole of Europe. It reaches hundreds of kilometres to the north, and before the age of the motorcar, it was the main means of transport for both people and goods in the southeast of Finland.

The fortress - or linnoitus - is a silent witness to Finland's complicated history with Russia. Originally, Finland was part of Sweden, and the fortress was a Swedish trading post that received town privileges by royal decree in 1649. At that time, after the latest war between Russia and Sweden, the border was relatively far away in the east, and the newly established Lappeenranta was well inside Swedish territory. Peace did not last long, however, and the borderline was gradually moved westwards when Russia forced Sweden to withdraw from the territory it had managed to take in the wars before 1649. Finally, as a result of the peace treaty of 1721, Lappeenranta found itself right on the borderline: it had become the easternmost town in Sweden. Concerned by the future, the Swedes started turning their trading post into a proper fortification.

As the Swedes had foreseen, clashes between the two countries continued, and in the 1743 peace treaty between Russia and Sweden, the Swedes had to cede Lappeenranta to the Russians, who decided to secure their presence in the region by redesigning the fortification. They probably needn't have to, as Sweden had lost its military might, and after the Napoleonic wars, the Swedish government had to cede the whole of Finland to Russia. To maintain stability in their newly acquired regions, the Russian leaders granted Finland political autonomy as a grand duchy and agreed to move the borderline back to the pre-1721 location.

As the Russian goodwill concerning Finnish autonomy didn't last longer than the year 1883, the relationship between the empire and its grand duchy grew sour, and during the tumultuous years of World War I, Finland declared independence in 1917.

During World War II, the Russian leaders challenged our independence again. After five years of warfare, the peace treaty was signed in 1944. As a result of it, Lappeenranta once again found itself right on the borderline.

The following video on the history of the fortress is in Finnish but has English subtitles.

After touring the fortress, we might have taken you on a cruise onboard M/S Camilla to Lake Saimaa and the Saimaa Canal, which connects the lake to the Baltic Sea. Stretching for 58 kilometres, the canal starts in Lappeenranta and ends in Vyborg, Russia.

Nowadays about half of the Saimaa Canal runs inside Russian territory; before World War II, both the canal and Vyborg were well within our territory.

EVENING

The cruise would have taken a couple of hours and brought us to the end of the official programme for today. Depending on the weather and the availability of rental bikes, you might have spent your evening on a leisurely ride through Lappeenranta - or taking gravel bikes on forest trails, just like these guys:

Some of you might even have taken out your laptops and - by accident - found the local tourist portal: