Same day (4.8), third museum, and the energies of all were sinking to very low levels. What museum were we stepping into next.

So the third museum of the day was what on Google Maps shows as Museo Militaria. In English that is called Finnish Artillery and Engineering museum. Like in the intro text above, the energy levels were dwindling on us all. So from the get go, we recommend that participants of this same trio ticket, take breaks, and either have own picnic food, or then take a pause at the cafeteria here at Militaria.

To be honest, I didn’t really have expectations, as I hadn’t familiarize beforehand to this museum. As we bought the trio museum package, we got an entrance sticker at the prison museum and castle(seen in the picture as pink and green stickers on the left side of my shirt). But here at the Militaria they handed not any stickers. All they did was check the line on the receipt, and guided us into the exhibition. A bit surprising.

Later on I started looking into this, and it seems that the museum is not part of the same coalition as prison and the castle. These two can be found on the The Finnish Heritage Agency website, but not the Museo Militaria. Militaria has it’s own website, and seems to be an own entity. To accommodate visitors, they combined forces to deliver a trio ticket package, which is great!

The museum is really noticeable, and contain’s a lot of material, text and pictures. They really filled up the indoor spaces with items. This could actually be a museum to visit by itself. On three floors, they have managed to bring a lot of artillery pieces, both small and large. Theres so much information at hand, not many can take it all in on a one visit basis.

The floors are dived into sections structured between time periods. 1st floor is from medieval times up to approximately 1918, the second flow is from 1919-1949, and the third floor is from 1950-2000.

One example of the good items can be see in the picture with a large map, and the artillery shells. It displayed how far the shells can be shot, and it really is well visualised on the map with kilometres in text, and the area with different colours. Combine four different onto one map was a great idea.

Another nice touch was to bring the howitzer that was used in honor of the funeral of Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. The howitzer is picture number seven in the slideshow.

Equally the section on encryption history was interesting. And having a German Enigma machine was very interesting to see. (picture 6 in the slideshow) For instance, did you know that about 50 BC, the ruler Julius Ceasar used encryption in letters, using the Caesar-cipher?

In the second picture, theres a marching drum and battle horn that has been used in war. So no parade instruments in question.

In addition to the three floors of items inside, Militaria had more vehicles and artillery on the yard.

As mentioned earlier in this post, the energy levels on everybody was very low, and we rushed thru the museum. A lot was missed, and we will most definitely visit again sometime with more energy and time. When we left this museum, we packed ourselves straight into the car, and headed over to a restaurant (Fresno) to eat, and fill up the energy reserves for us all, to being able to head over the to fourth and last museum for the day.