Picnic on the Graveyard

Vanha kirkkopuisto (Old Church Park) is a pleasant small park on Bulevardi, very near to Mannerheimintie and Esplanadi. The park has a smallish wooden church on one edge, and trees here and there to provide shade on hot summer days.

One thing makes the park rather peculiar: it is an old graveyard, and you can still see gravestones among people bathing on the sun or having a picnic. Nobody has been buried there since 1919. The park is also called as “the plague park”, as there are stories that people killed by the plague in 1710 were buried here. Some historians have opposed this views, and they claim that those poor people were buried farther away from the edge of the city.

There is a well-stocked grocery store on the other side of the road at one corner of the park, so you don’t have to bring anything with you (except money) to have a fast picnic.

Vanha Kirkkopuisto, Lönnrotinkatu 6, Helsinki, Finland