Viborg (still known as Wiburg in the first half of the 19th century)

Russian: Vyborg

Finnish: Viipuri; Swedish: Viborg

There are several folk etymological derivations: ‘Viehburg’ (German), from a native named ‘Vipunen’ (Finnish), and from ‘Vybor’, the son of a Novgorod prince (Russian). Scientifically, however, the town’s name is traced back to ‘castle on the sacred site’ (sacred site = ‘vi’ in Scandinavian religious terminology).

Vyborg (60° 42′ N, 28° 46′ E, approx. 120 km north-west of Saint Petersburg/Saint-Peterburg/Leningrad) lies on the southern edge of the Karelian Isthmus, the narrow strip of land between the Baltic Sea and Lake Ladoga. The railway and European Route 18 connect St Petersburg with Helsinki via Vyborg. A 40 km-wide land passage to the Vuoksi River, which flows past the town to the north, marked the starting point in the Middle Ages of the Ranefahrerweg, a smuggling route continuing across Lake Ladoga and up the Volkhov River to the Russian trading republic of Novgorod.

Vyborg Castle was built on an island in the strait, with the Old Town and the fortifications on either side of the strait, which separates the inner bay of Zaliv kovš (Finnish: Salakkalahti) from the outer bay, Vyborg Bay (Vyborgskij zaliv), which forms part of the open Gulf of Finland. The Saimaa Canal (Sajmenskij kanal, Finnish: Saimaan kanava, built 1844–1856) flows into the inner bay, connecting to the eastern Finnish inland waterway system of Lake Saimaa near Lappeenranta.

The influence of the Baltic Sea moderates the subarctic continental climate; the average temperature is -8°C in February and +17°C in July.

Russian Federation; Vyborg is the administrative centre of the Vyborg District (Municipal’noe obrazovanie‘Vyborgskij rajon’) in the Leningrad District (Leningradskaja oblast’), which forms part of the North-Western Federal District of the Russian Federation (Severo-zapadnyj federal’nyj okrug). The town itself constitutes a municipal entity subordinate to the district (Municipal’noe obrazovanie ‘Gorod Vyborg’).

Vyborg is the seat of a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Metropolitanate of Saint Petersburg.

A distinctive feature of the coat of arms is the letter W in gold; the three golden crowns above it (on a red field), which were a reference to the Swedish coat of arms, were removed in 1817, and an image of the fortress in silver was added – now positioned below the W. The current coat of arms is similar to the earlier version, although the shield is divided by a gold stripe.

Due to unfavourable economic and ideological conditions, the urban area has as yet been little researched. There is evidence of fairly intensive Stone Age settlement in the region, which became less dense as a result of land uplift and the subsequent reversal of the river’s course. Its location on the northern branch of the Eurasian trade route is evidenced by characteristic finds, including Arab coins.

The present-day town developed on the outskirts of an older settlement, under the protection of the island fortress founded in 1293 by Sweden in the territory that paid tribute to Novgorod. Just two years later, King Birger Magnusson (1280–1321) invited merchants from the Baltic Sea cities, although the Peace of Nöteborg was not concluded until 1323. Vyborg served as a port of call for the ‘Rane route’ (smugglers’ route) to Novgorod, which was used during embargoes, and the interest of the castle commanders – who enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy until 1534 – in trade with Russia continued to attract Germans to the town. In 1534, Gustav I Vasa (1496–1560) established royal rule.

With Sweden’s expansion to the Neva (Treaty of Stolbovo, 1617), Vyborg transformed from a border town into the eastern administrative centre of Finland and a stronghold of Swedish culture. A year after Sweden’s defeat at Poltava in 1709 during the Great Northern War (1700–1721), the town – like Sweden’s Baltic provinces – was conquered by Russia, but gradually, along with its region (‘Old Finland’), it was granted a modest degree of autonomy governed by Swedish law and with German as the official language,^[1] which was incorporated into Catherine the Great’s governorate constitution between 1784 and 1796. After the eastern half of the Swedish Empire had fallen to Russia in 1809, Vyborg and its surrounding area were incorporated in 1812 into the newly created autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland as a further governorate, with Vyborg as its capital.

Finland seceded from Russia following the October Revolution of 1917. Vyborg became a key battleground in the ensuing Finnish Civil War, which the ‘Whites’ won with German assistance, after which they pushed for a German to be elected king. Turning its back on Germany, which had been defeated in the First World War, Finland then declared itself an independent republic in 1919. Ceded following the defeat in the Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1939–1940, Vyborg and its region – having initially been recaptured by Finland in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union – finally became Soviet territory in 1944 and thus Russian in 1991. Following glasnost and perestroika, lively cross-border traffic from Finland to Saint Petersburg began in 1990. However, in the shadow of Saint Petersburg, Vyborg cannot recapture the significance it once held as Finland’s second most important and second largest city.

In the Middle Ages, at least half of the mayors had to be Swedish citizens.^[2] Russia upheld the city’s traditional freedoms and treated the region in the same way as the German-influenced Baltic provinces; under the municipal code in force from 1784 to 1797, alongside the governorate constitution, Russians also served as councillors. During the period of autonomy, the traditional municipal freedom was transformed into a modern system of self-government and replaced by the council system in 1944. Since 2004, the city has had a council of 20 deputies elected by district; they appoint the chief administrator through a committee subject to state influence.

Documentary evidence shows that German names accounted for over 60 per cent of the total up to 1534.^[3] Alongside the Finnish-speaking majority, a Swedish-speaking population became established by 1710, only to decline subsequently in favour of the Russian-speaking population. In 1809, Vyborg had 12.5 per cent German-speaking inhabitants. Urbanisation led to the emergence of a Finnish-speaking town, but the other languages persisted until 1944, partly due to revolutionary emigration.^[4]

Population figures and demographic composition by mother tongue

The almost complete evacuation of the local population then led to a demographic shift, and a Russian town emerged, whose population rose rapidly from around 2,500 (1945) to 65,188 (1970) and has hovered around 80,000 since 1986.^[7]

From the very beginning, trade was the mainstay of Viborg’s economy; the best-known trading house, established in 1790 by Johann Friedrich Hackmann (1755–1807), an immigrant from Bremen, expanded into metalworking (including kitchenware) and developed into a modern Finnish industrial group, which was only absorbed into larger companies after 2000. Today, there are major cellulose factories in the surrounding area. The Nord Stream gas pipeline to Lubmin, which begins here, has, since 2011, revived Viborg’s medieval role as a gateway providing Germany with direct access to Russian raw materials.

Founded in 1806 by teachers at the German grammar school as a reading society, the municipal library focused on German-language literature. In 1910, the existing libraries were merged to form a modern municipal library. Housed since 1935 in an exemplary building designed by Alvar Aalto (1898–1976), it has borne his name since 1998 and was restored between 1994 and 2014.^[9] The Monrepos Pavilion, just outside the city gates, housed a famous library of 18th-century European literature. Since the Second World War, it has been held at the National Library in Helsinki. In the 19th century, Vyborg’s German upper class attracted many German-speaking theatre companies on their route to Saint Petersburg.^[10] From 1899, a permanent company performed in the theatre built for this purpose in 1841; in 1931, it merged with the Workers’ Theatre to form the Municipal Theatre. Today’s Vyborg no longer has a permanent theatre.

The stylish building of the Art Museum (1930, Uno Ullberg [1879–1944]) now houses the ‘Vyborg Hermitage’ (Ėrmitaž-Vyborg), a branch of the art museum of the same name in Saint Petersburg.

The court of this castle fief, which enjoyed a degree of autonomy until 1534, was a centre of courtly culture, particularly between 1525 and 1534 under Count Johann von Hoya (after 1480–1535), Gustav Vasa’s brother-in-law.

When it was elevated to the status of a Protestant bishopric, Vyborg became the site of a grammar school. In 1790, Catherine the Great (1729–1796) founded the teacher-training college as a model school for German schools in central Russia; in 1805, a German grammar school supervised by the University of Dorpat/Tartu was established (until 1842), which admitted graduates from a comprehensive network of six district schools (including those in Savonlinna and Sortavala). A German-speaking private grammar school remained in operation until 1881.^[11]

Attempts during the interwar period to establish a university alongside the various grammar schools and technical colleges failed. Since 2000, there has been a branch of the Alexander Herzen State Pedagogical University of St Petersburg.

As a walled medieval town, and indeed even after its redesign into a chessboard-like fortress town, Vyborg was the north-easternmost outpost of Central European small-town urbanity. Multilingualism, with Finnish serving as a ‘non-academic’ lingua franca for centuries, gave rise to sociolects rich in anecdotes. A characteristic feature was the good relationship between Germans and Russians in the upper classes.

A printing house was established at the Swedish grammar school; it was attended by Mikael Agricola (c. 1509–1557), the translator of the Finnish Bible. During the Russian period, it was not until 1814 that a printing house was able to establish itself again; it published the Vyborg Weekly from 1823 to 1832, after which the press began publishing in Finnish and Swedish.

From the time of its foundation, Vyborg was a border fortress; its importance waned with Sweden’s eastward expansion from 1617 onwards, but was revived during the Russian period as the line of defence shifted westwards. Particularly following the Swedish war of aggression from 1788 to 1790, it became the centre of the fortification belt planned by General Alexander Suvorov (1730–1800) across eastern Finland and a significant garrison town. Between 1939 and 1944, the town suffered severe damage as a result of the war.

• Carl Jacob Gardberg, Per-Olof Weilin: Vyborg: a city of stone. Espoo 1996.
• Evgenij Evgen’evič Kepp: Vyborg: Chudožestvennye dostopri­mečatelnosti [Vyborg and its Artistic Monuments]. Vyborg 1992.
• Löha Krykoff, Yevgeny Balashov, Elvira Kropova: Sellainen on Viipuri [This is Vyborg Today!]. Edited by Vladimir Waldin. Vyborg et al. 1993.
• Gabriel Lagus: Ur Wiborgs historia [From the History of Vyborg]. Vol. 1–2. Vyborg 1893–1895.
• Petri Neuvonen, Tuula Pöyhiä, Tapani Mustonen: Vyborg – architekturnyj putevoditel’ [Architectural Guide to Vyborg]. Vyborg 2006.
• Johan Wilhelm Ruuth: Wiborg stads historia [History of the City of Vyborg]. Vol. 1–2. Vyborg 1906.
• Robert Schweitzer: The Germans of Vyborg. Helsinki 1993.
• Alexander Siegfried: From the History of the German Community in Vyborg. In: Deutsch-evangelisch in Finnland 30 (1943), Issue 1, pp. 4–13.
• Viipurin kaupungin historia [History of the City of Vyborg], written [based on the work of] J[ohan] W[ilhelm] Ruuth, revised [edited] by Erkki Kuujo. Parts 1–5. Lappeenranta 1974–1982.

• Publications of the Viipuri Finnish Literary Society [Schriften der Wiborger finnischen Literaturgesellschaft], 1976 onwards.
• *Viborgs Nyheter* [Viborg News], 1953 onwards (New Series; an annual cultural journal, continuing the tradition of the newspaper published from 1899 to 1939)

• vbglenobl.ru/ (Official website of the Vyborg District, with a section dedicated to the town of Vyborg)

[1] Erkki Kuujo: German as an Official Language in Old Finland. In: Edgar Hösch, Hermann Beyer-Thoma (eds.): Studies on Finland 2. Wiesbaden 1993 (Publications of the Institute for Eastern European Studies, Munich: History Series 63), pp. 27–32.

[2] A persistent misconception in the literature is that at least half of the mayors had to be German; this view is also held by Joachim Heldt and Reinhold Weisflog: Finland. In: Concise Dictionary of German Communities in Border Regions and Abroad. Vol. 2. Stuttgart 1934, pp. 499–514. (Otherwise, however, this article remains fundamental and surprisingly free of ideological bias, despite the overall bias of the work as a whole).

[3] *Viipurin kaupungin historia I* [History of the City of Vyborg I], pp. 146ff.; Rolf Dencker: *Finnland’s Städte und hansisches Bürgertum* (up to 1471). In: *Hansische Geschichtsblätter* 77 (1959), pp. 13–93, here p. 52, gives slightly lower figures.

[4] Marika Tandefelt (ed.): Viborg’s Four Languages over Seven Centuries. Espoo 2002.

[5] For the years up to 1910, see *Viipurin kaupungin historia IV* [History of the City of Vyborg IV], pp. 40–43, 254ff. and 259–261; totals do not add up to 100 per cent.

[6] Official Statistics of Finland. 6: Population Statistics. 71:3 Viipuri Census 27 November 1930. Tabular Appendices [Official Statistics of Finland. 6: Population Statistics. 71:3 The Viipuri Census of 27 November 1930. Tabular Supplement], pp. 24–25, col. 40.

[7] ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%8B%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B3, under heading 3: Naselenie [Population] (accessed 13 December 2014).

[8] Schweitzer: The Wiborger Germans, p. 96, with (corrective) reference to *Viipurin kaupungin historia IV* [History of the City of Vyborg IV], pp. 254ff.

[9] Michael Spens: Viipuri Library, 1927–1935, Alvar Aalto [The Vyborg City Library, built by Alvar Aalto 1927–1935]. London 1994; Ljubov’ Kudrjavceva (ed.): Alvar Aalto: karelskij šedevr [Alvar Aalto’s Masterpiece in Karelia]. Vyborg 2008.

[10] Sven Hirn: Teatern i Viborg 1743–1870 [The Theatre in Vyborg 1743–1870]. Helsinki 1970.

[11] Edgar Hösch: German Educators in Old Finland at the Turn of the 19th Century. In: Finnland-Studien 2 (note 1), pp. 33–61. See also Harald Hornborg, Ingegerd Lundén Cronström (eds.): Viborg’s Gymnasium 1805–1842: A Biographical Register. Helsingfors 1961.

[12] Order of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Regional Development of the Russian Federation dated 29 July 2010. No. 418/339 ‘On the Approval of the List of Historic Settlements’ [Decree of the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Regional Development of the Russian Federation of 29 July 2010 No. 418/339 ‘On the Approval of the List of Historic Settlements’]. Russkaya Gazeta: federal edition, No. 5298, 29 September 2010.

Robert Schweitzer, in collaboration with Michail Kostolomov: Vyborg. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2015. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32536 (as at 26 April 2021).