Military History | Ehrensvärd's Tomb, Suomenlinna — One Year Among Six

The convention was signed inside the fortress on 6 April 1808. Sveaborg — named in 1750, rendered in Finnish as Viapori, and renamed Suomenlinna in 1918 — would be handed to the besieging Russian force unless at least five Swedish ships of the line reached it by 3 May. None came.

At the siege's start, on the Finnish Heritage Agency's figures, the fortress held 190 officers and 6,560 other ranks, over 700 craftsmen and about 1,800 civilians, mostly women and children; the Russian force before it grew from 2,000 in early March to about 6,500 by early April. Six people inside were killed in the bombardments. The Governing Body of Suomenlinna, which runs the islands today, says of the commandant's decision only that "the reasons for surrender remains an unsolved mystery."

The handover began at midday on 3 May. On 6 May the last troops out formed for a parade on the Great Courtyard of Susisaari, at the tomb of Augustin Ehrensvärd, who had begun the fortress in 1748: a monument sketched by Gustav III, worked up by Ehrensvärd's son and executed by Johan Tobias Sergel, finished probably in 1805. In the Heritage Agency's account of how the surrender was judged afterwards, it was held particularly grave that Cronstedt had, against express orders, given the archipelago fleet's ships to the enemy and handed over to them even Ehrensvärd's grave. The historian Martin Hårdstedt writes that the Russians celebrated no event of the Finnish War more, showing the fortress's flags as trophies at a victory parade in St Petersburg.

The courtyard lies a kilometre from the ferry pier. Three hundred metres south, at the edge of Piper's Park, a granite shaft cut in 1951 by the architect Elsi Borg carries the word MORTVIS and six numbers, and nothing else. The Helsinki Art Museum lists all six as catastrophes. The first is 1808.

📸 Cover: Ehrensvärd's tomb on the Great Courtyard, the granite chest on a stepped platform with its bronze helmet and two boat-shaped forms, a yellow-washed building on a stone base behind, autumn leaves on the gravel. Photograph by Teemu Perhiö for Wikimedia Finland, 25 October 2014, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image, the tomb seen closer from the other side, by Mikkoau, 19 August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0.