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Helsinki History
Helsinki has a very intersting story.Helsinki was founded in 1550 by Swedish king Gustav Vasa and is the sixth-oldest town in Finland. The king longed to create a rival to the Hansa trading town of Tallinn, the present-day capital of Estonia. By royal decree traders from Ekenäs and a few other towns were bundled off to the newly founded settlement, known as Helsingfors.For more than 200 years Helsinki remained a backwater market town on a windy, rocky peninsula. A capital closer to St Petersburg was needed to keep a better watch on Finland's domestic politics. The nationalists prevailed in 1918, and Helsinki developed quickly to become a world-class capital. It suffered Russian bombing during WWII, but in the postwar period Helsinki recovered and went on to host the Olympic Games in 1952.In the 1970s and 80s, many new suburbs were built around Helsinki, and residents celebrated their 'Helsinki Spirit', a term used for Cold War détente. Helsinki has served as an international conference point on numerous occasions for everything from weighty economic summits to the World Dog Show. It has become a major technology centre and one of Europe's fastest-growing cities. It was a European Capital of Culture in 2000.
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