Juhannus

The Saturday between the 20th and the 26th

Finland fixes this one by law and the Almanac Office of the University of Helsinki, which keeps the state calendar, states it plainly: Midsummer Day, the Day of the Finnish Flag, is the Saturday between 20 and 26 June. Midsummer Eve is the Friday before. The flag rule is unlike any other day of the year — it goes up at six in the evening on Midsummer Eve and is not taken down until nine the following evening, so it flies straight through the shortest night.

The name is not pagan even if the festival is. Juhannus is a form of "John": the feast of Saint John the Baptist falls on or near the solstice, and the Christian name settled on an older celebration of the light. Today it is thoroughly secular.

Where everyone goes

Finns spend Midsummer at a waterside cottage — swim, sauna, and not much else — and the cities empty out in the course of Friday afternoon. Bonfires, kokko, are the old ritual that survived, lit on shores and islands late in the evening, which at that latitude still means daylight. In the Swedish-speaking parts of the country and on Åland the bonfire gives way to a decorated maypole instead.

Helsinki, Tampere and the other large cities now put on public celebrations for the people who stay, and those are the easiest way in for a visitor: a shore, a fire, a stage, and a crowd that looks surprised to be in town.

The statistic

Midsummer is also the weekend on which Finland drowns. Yle, reporting the Finnish Swimming Teaching and Lifesaving Federation's figures, gives an average of six deaths every Midsummer over the past decade; in the country as a whole there are roughly 100 to 150 accidental drownings a year and almost half of the people who drown are intoxicated. The pattern is not dramatic — someone swimming, or moving a rowing boat, or stepping off a dock, usually alone, usually in water they had known since childhood. It is worth knowing before the second sauna.