I was asleep, in the countryside, surrounded by the silence of fields, forest and lake, when suddenly I was startled by a hard, metallic, varied sound. Sleepily, I thought: 'Switch it off!' The sound continued, and I woke up. A nightingale was singing. In the copse behind the outdoor lavatory it was defining its territory. Perhaps the noisy nightingale is romantic only in poetry.
     In his book Puutarhassa ('In the garden'), the poet Väinö Kirstinä describes how he and his wife have for more than thirty years been defining their territory in an old country cabin and the stony ground that surrounds it: they have gradually created a garden. Kirstinä is pedantic, sensitive and ecological in his approach to his surroundings. My late aunt tried, in vain, to make a rose garden on a rocky island in the sea. Kirstinä rec-ognises the power of nature and respects it, but at the same time shapes a garden that is beautiful and diverse. He gives even the stones their due – they store heat – and gives up planting beeches which might get out of hand and destroy the native trees.
     In Finland, unlike many other European countries, there is a strong law that allows anyone to wander in field and forest, picking mushrooms and berries. One can own without owning, with the mind, the feelings, the eyes and the senses, as the Norwegian Tarjei Vesaas wrote in his novel Brannen ('The Fire', 1961): 'It is not easy to know what is small and what is great. I believe it is a great thing that I have owned a large green field. A flowering meadow I have had. But it is a small thing to tell a passer-by. I realise I could have gone without mentioning it now, too.'
     Ownership, or at least control, belongs, however, to the concept of territory. A town-dweller's territory is his home. Kari Hotakainen's novel Juoksuhaudantie ('The Trench Road'), depicts the primitive zeal which takes hold of a man who attempts to win his family back by getting it a better, bigger nest. In the real world, too, houses sell like hot cakes. Interest rates are low. Furniture stores offer dreams of a lovely home inhabited by a happy family or a sociable single.


Minna Sarantola-Weiss's doctoral thesis describes the history of the furnishing of the Finnish home, whose focus is the three-piece suite. Her analysis of photographs, interior decoration guides and advertisements vividly depicts what sort of ideals have informed the territory of the home at different times. We create homeliness, safety, freshness and comfort, but unlike the nightingale or the magpie we like to show our homes to others, too.
     Ben Kaila's photoraphs, on the other hand, show the homeless. In Helsinki, the problem is not as great as in many big cities. On the other hand, conditions are tough because of the severity of the winter. And it is not only the nest and the roof that are absent; the homeless also lack something that is essential to human beings, too – territory. When you wander in search of somewhere to sleep, your rucksack on your back and plastic bags in your hands, there is really not much you can call your own.
     Particularly in the 1970s, chronic alcoholics built temporary shelters on the sea-shores and in the forests. They found a home, a territory, in cabins scraped together from old planks and pieces of corrugated iron; they were often furnished with photographs and newspaper cuttings on the walls, curtains, ornaments and even house-plants. Aki Kaurismäki depicts such surroundings sensitively in his latest film, Mies vailla menneisyyttä ('The man without a past'). Sadly, this community spirit too is perhaps part of the past.


The Iraq war is, in the eyes of the media, over, and like other wars it is gradually moving to the periphery of the news. Refugees, the displaced and the homeless, are living without terri-tory. Can their voices be heard in our dreams?
     The Lahti Writers' Reunion this summer addresses the subject of 'The Holy'. In the secularised west, the home or family is hardly sacred any more. The right to territory, one's own place, house, home district, might perhaps be sacred, but do the nocturnal voices of those who lack them wake us at night? We sleep under our IKEA duvet covers and turn over.


Kristina Carlson
Editor-in-Chief

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