Turku - Where it is

The city I am studying is called Turku and therefore I want to tell some general facts about this city. Turku is situated on the west southern part of Finland and is known as the oldest city in Finland. Further north the next biggest city is Tampere. Helsinki, which is Finland’s capital city, is located more in the southeast of Finland and is about 2 hours away by train or bus.

Map of Finland

Turku once used to be the capital city of Finland as it was very close to Sweden. At this point I have to add that Finland and Sweden belonged together and this is the reason why there are still a lot of Swedish speaking persons living in Turku nowadays. At the moment Turku still has a Swedish speaking university called Abo academy and all pupils have to learn Swedish in school. I have already met a swedisch speaking Finn from Aland which is a little Island next to Turku and she told me that even though Finns learn Swedish in school she sometimes faces difficulties when trying to speak Swedish with Finns living in Turku.

As I have already told before, Turku has a lot of university and therefore lots of students are living in this city. Most of them moved to Turku from another village or town near Turku and are renting apartments at the Student village or have a room in any of the TYS (Turun Ylioppilaskyläsäätiö) apartments which are situated all over the city. TYS is an organisation which offers housing for students. I chose this housing opportunity as an exchange students because it is affordable and the apartments can be rent with furniture.

Because Turku was the oldest city, it quickly became the most important one and this retained the status for hundreds of years. After Finland became part of the Russian Empire in 1809 and the capital was moved to Helsinki. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turku, 22.3.15)

The name Turku has his origin in an Old East Slavic word, tǔrgǔ and means "market place".