The Station of Golden Silence

On 22^nd August 2022, I arrived at Helsinki-Vantaa airport with a luggage bag, a few euros and a broken spirit. I’d booked this trip about a month in advance on a sudden whim after delaying it for so long, with the hopes that it would reawaken something in me or at least be a comforting memory to take with me when I finally faced oblivion.

I was tired, having risen early in the morning to catch my flight on top of already being weighed down by my depression. As such, all I wanted to do when I arrived was head straight to my hotel for some food and get an early night in what I hoped would be a comfortable bed. Dreaming of those silky sheets, I headed out of the airport and took the elevator down to the airport train station, with anxiety starting to slowly stir in my stomach.

Now, travelling in a foreign place is unsettling at the best of times, but when you’re a young woman travelling alone and also not in the best mental state, that anxiety amplifies ten-fold. What if I got lost? What if I was attacked? What if I didn’t have enough money? It was this fear about travelling and using public transport that initially delayed my trip, and on the ride down to the train station, I began to wonder if this was all one huge mistake. With every metre the elevator fell, I felt my stomach going with it, as I knew once those doors slid open, I would have no choice but to face threat number one- the train station.

Having lived in England all my life, my expectations of the scenes I was about to walk in to where not exactly glowing with optimism. At that point in time, all the train stations I had encountered on English soil were places you wouldn’t hang around in any longer than necessary. They were loud, dangerous, unclean and just generally claustrophobic places to be, so that even if there was a seat available for you to sit down in whilst waiting for your train, you very rarely did. In fact, if you looked too relaxed at a station, you could risk being unceremoniously carted off for displaying suspicious behaviour.

With thoughts of screeching trains, yelling staff, bustling crowds, and people screaming about delays whirling around my head, the level of shock that hit me when I stepped out of the elevator to complete silence made my hair stand on end.

I visibly winced as the wheels of my luggage bag started to clunk along the floor on my way to buy a ticket from the machine. On instinct, a few heads turned to look at me and I flushed to communicate that I was sorry for so rudely slicing through their silence (I couldn’t apologise out loud, could I? I’d already broken the silence once, what would happen if I tried to speak?). All the people that seemed to do so, however, only glanced for a second, and most of them seemed to have luggage bags with them, as if they’d just come straight from the airport as well. Those without luggage bags, who I presumed to be native Finns, just continued staring at their phones or into space like nothing had happened. As I stood waiting for the train, staring up at the dark ceiling that seemed to be miles away, I wondered what that meant. If it meant anything at all, that is, or if I was just panicking about doing something that might offend someone in this new country where even train station etiquette was the exact opposite of what I was used to.

After a warming breakfast at the hotel the next morning, I set off with my shoulder bag (no clunky wheels to break any silences this time. Phew) to Pasila train station, where I planned to catch the next train to Helsinki. When I arrived at one of its many side entrances, I was again struck by how silent everything was and how utterly deserted the entire place seemed to be. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and although I wasn’t expecting the station to be as packed as, say, London Euston at that time, I didn’t expect to be the only person on the platform. Eventually, one or two other people joined me, but they kept their distance and stayed wrapped in their own thoughts, so that their presence didn’t really make that much of a difference to the still atmosphere.

Anxious that I was starting to look suspicious by repeatedly looking over my shoulder (it’s just habit, okay?), I turned my attention to the departure board and studied it carefully. What immediately struck me about it wasn’t the fact that there was no message detailing any form of delay (although this was still surprising, because in England, if the train board doesn’t say your train is delayed or cancelled, it’s either a minor miracle or extremely suspicious), but the fact that both the destination and departing station had two names- one in Finnish and one in Swedish.

Having researched some facts about Finland before arriving, I was already aware that the country had both Finnish and Swedish as its primary languages. I was therefore fully prepared to see both languages in various places across the city, but I had not, perhaps naively, assumed that place names would be affected by this too. But there they were on the board, telling me that I was departing from Pasila, or, Böle, and heading to Helsinki, or Helsingfors.

In that lonely, deathly silent railway station, history was written across every board, and it struck me that after over one hundred years of independence, and over two hundred years free from Swedish rule, the mark of Sweden’s forced presence in Finland was still visible practically everywhere. I began to wonder what the current Finnish population thought of this, or if they even paid that much attention to it. Either way, it’s always strange to see evidence of the blurring of past and present, and being reminded that sometimes the dividing line between the two is actually just a fiction designed to make us feel better.

With no other sounds on the platform there to break me out of these thoughts, I stayed wrapped in them right up until the moment the train to Helsinki arrived. It slid into the station so quietly I actually nearly missed it, and when it did stop, there was no scramble to get on board like there was back home. Expecting to have to scavenge for a free seat, I was pleasantly surprised to find that no such rush or panic was necessary, as there were only four other people in the carriage. On top of that, they were also all spread out, leaving me utterly spoiled for choice as to where I could sit. I therefore naturally gravitated towards a window seat, forward facing as I preferred, and felt my thoughts wandering again as soon as the train started moving.

It was the middle of summer and I was catching a morning train to the city’s capital, the train station of which is also internationally heralded as a stunning piece of Finnish architecture that all tourists are told they ‘must see’. So… where was everyone? I was on the correct train, right? Yes, I was on the correct train. Then why was everything so quiet, so clean, so… empty?

Aside from this inner confusion, the five-minute journey from Pasila to Helsinki was incredibly peaceful. Unlike the clunky, rattling trains back home, the trains seemed to glide along the rails with little to no noise and pulled gently in to every station, meaning that you didn’t have to hold on to a seat for dear life out of the fear of being thrown forward the moment it stopped. It also suddenly struck me as I was jumping off the train onto the platform that no one had checked to see if I had a ticket or not. I did, of course, but throughout my stay I never had my ticket checked and nor did I see anyone else being asked to present their tickets. The entire transport network in Helsinki appeared to be based on trust and yet somehow still thriving as one of the best transport networks in Europe. I couldn’t help but laugh privately to myself trying to imagine such a model being used in England. It would collapse within a week at best.

With that amusing thought in mind, it was time to take in one of Finland’s top attractions- the Rautatieasema, or Järnvägs station, as it is otherwise known.

Now, I am by no means an architecture connoisseur, but even my inexperienced and tired mind could appreciate how stunning the building was. Designed by Eliel Saarinen, the station is built mostly of granite, has a beautiful arched entrance with a flag raised above it and features an impressive clock tower. Arguably the most iconic feature of the station, however, are the two pairs of stone men that stand ‘guard’ at the station’s entrance holding lamps that shine beautifully at night. In this respect, the station is one that deserves to be seen both during daylight hours and when it goes dark, even if entering it can be unnerving at first for foreign visitors who may not be used to the idea of a train station being silent, particularly when it is located in a capital city.

Though formidable, this preference for peace and quiet is not intended to be intimidating. Whilst in some countries such as England, talk, no matter how big or small, is considered the ‘polite thing to do’ (as silence is supposedly rude and awkward), Finns on the other hand are very fond of silence. In fact, they even have a famous proverb that runs ‘speech is silver, silence is golden’ to demonstrate their aversion to small talk and unnecessary noise. Being unaccustomed to such silence, whilst I was in the station I sometimes found myself getting the urge to yell something, simply to hear some noise other than the voices in my head, and I say this as one of those ‘rude, awkward’ people who barely speaks. Occasionally I think my brain even made up its own noises to fill in the silence, like it couldn’t quite equate the lack of noise I was hearing with the place I was seeing.

One of the reasons this all felt so alien was because in that station, I could think freely, breathe freely and feel content in the fact I was standing in one of the safest transport facilities in the world. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder every two minutes out of fear someone was trying to steal from me, nor did I have to fear being crushed on my way into a carriage. Everyone kept to themselves, there was no one eyeing you up and you could simply exist in peace. I’d never had that in a train station before. Or anywhere in public, when I really think about it.

Is it really any wonder then that I cried every time I was there, waiting patiently for the train home in the Station of Golden Silence?