Sorry we’re a few days behind. Internet has been hard to come by since the city basically shut down from Good Friday to Easter Monday for the Easter holiday.
To start off the Easter holiday the Turku Cathedral had a ballet performance inside on Friday afternoon, then later that night at 9:30 (the sun is now going down around 9:45) there was a passion play on the front steps of the cathedral. We opted to go to the passion play, since I had never attended one before. All of the dialogue was in Finnish, but we know the story inside out so it was easy to follow along. Opening up the play was a group of young ballet dancers who ushered in (a very Finnish looking) Jesus followed by his disciples. The play continued on into the cold night and went all the way through to Jesus’ resurrection, which I thought was a little premature, considering it was only Friday. But, for those who didn’t know the entire story it wrapped it up so they didn’t have to come back on Sunday to find out how it ended. Overall, we really enjoyed the play and we were both impressed with the artistic way in which they interpreted the story. The audience was very stoic throughout, well that is except for the drunk man across the river who yelled what I’m guessing was profanities at us for the first 20 minutes of the play. Other than that, there was no sign of emotion from anyone except the actors, nevertheless, it was very evident that the church and this story are an incredibly important component to Finnish culture.
The Wild Rose 