The year is 1808. Finland is part of Sweden. The war between Russia and Sweden is raging in Savo as well. Human life is cheap when the diseases carried by war — typhus, smallpox, and many others — spread efficiently.
Now it is the year 2026. More than two hundred years after these events, one question troubles me: why have we forgotten the people of the past? Did their lives have no meaning beyond staying alive and paying their taxes to the kingdom?
History forgets ordinary people first. Most often women, who in our own time might be cashiers at supermarkets or practical nurses in home care at the beginning of their careers.
That is why I decided to imagine nineteen-year-old Kaisa. She lived in the small town of Kuopio as a maid. Kaisa is imagined, but her story could be true. I give her a name so that the past might, for a moment, feel closer.
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Kaisa sits on the shore of Lake Kallavesi on a summer evening after a fourteen-hour working day and kicks off her wooden clogs. She looks out over the lake. Soft evening light filters through the birch leaves, and the branches move in the gentle wind.
She breathes in the scent of wild rosemary and tar from the shore and lets her thoughts drift to a place where the weight of work is forgotten. She does not dream of marriage or the sons of households, as the other girls on Vartiovuori do.
Her thoughts return to the maid from the neighbouring house, the grey-eyed girl with whom she carried sacks of grain earlier that week.
Kaisa remembers the moment when their hands accidentally touched at the mouth of a flour sack. It was a fleeting touch in the midst of everyday toil, but it lingered on her skin for a long time.
She also remembers the look at the well: grey eyes resting on her for a moment longer than mere friendliness would have required, gently and questioningly.
Kaisa looks at the mirror-calm lake and feels a small, secret warmth in her chest. She does not know how to name the feeling, but she hopes that the autumn hirings will keep them together. That she will see those eyes again and feel the same confusing, safe closeness.
On that beautiful summer evening, Kaisa believes there are still many summers ahead of them. She is wrong.
> Typhoid fever and typhus do their work quickly and mercilessly.
A year later, in the autumn of 1809, the war is over, but what it brought with it remains. Typhoid fever and typhus do their work quickly and mercilessly. The evening is cold when the grey eyes turn into feverish delirium. Kaisa dies on the floor of a dark farmhouse room without anyone holding her hand.
The burial strips away the last trace of her humanity. No coffin is made for Kaisa, because wood is saved for the wealthier. Her wasted body is wrapped in a coarse grey burial shift.
She is placed in the parish’s black loan coffin and carried to Kirkonmäki.
At the edge of the grave, the bottom of the coffin is opened, and Kaisa’s body falls into the bottom of a common trench grave among the others. The empty coffin is lifted up for the next body. Lime and earth are thrown on top.
That same skin once trembled at the touch of another girl and enjoyed the summer by Lake Kallavesi.
It rots, nameless, in the soil of Snellman Park, beneath our feet.
The next time I walk there, I will inevitably step on Kaisa. I cannot avoid it. But I can choose: to remain unaware, or to stop, to look down at the ground and know that someone is there. Someone was.
The same earth conceals countless stories of which we know nothing. In every city, on every street, there have been people who loved, feared, and hoped, just as we do now.
Perhaps we can still stop and find out who they were.
The writer is a world-changer who views things from the perspective of the little person.