Every design for Savonlinna

Savonlinna is known around the world for Olavinlinna, the medieval castle built on an island, and for the opera festival staged inside its walls every year. Nyslott in Swedish, meaning new castle, the town grew up beside the fortress that Erik Axelsson Tott founded to guard Savo and the uneasy border between Sweden and Russia.

Riihisaaren museo, the provincial museum near the castle, tells the rest of the story, and its historic steamboats, Riihisaaren museolaivat, belong to the same museum. In the nineteenth century the new Saimaa canal brought visitors to the town's spa. Savonlinna has been burnt, stripped of its charter and refounded more than once; Per Brahe first made a town of the castle settlement, and the area later spent decades under Russian rule before returning as part of Old Finland. Today the town also takes in Kerimäki, with the largest wooden church in the world, and Punkaharju with its forest museum, and it even hosts a world championship in mobile phone throwing.

The image that stays is the castle rising straight out of the water of Kyrönsalmi, the strait the whole town was built beside.