Resilient Fortress

Fortified heritage unites architecture with landscape. The 18th century fortified archipelago Suomenlinna in front of the city of Helsinki, has eight kilometers of fortified masonry walls and earthworks. Since 1990’s they are continuously repaired, maintained and documented. Unfortunately a recent survey proves that the degradation of fortified walls is faster than it was 10 years ago, due to extreme weather conditions and an increasing number of freeze-thaw cycles. Also, the earthworks and their vegetation are more and more eroded due to increasing tourism and specially due to a a big number of low season visitors when, during mild winters, the lack of ground frost makes the landscape extremely vulnerable. Facing the challenges of climate change, the awareness of environmental sustainability has increased in the field of heritage preservation and also in Suomenlinna World Heritage Site. Applying for this project the Governing Body of Suomenlinna wanted to find European partners, with examples of restoration work of fortifications in similar conditions and examples of fortified landscape maintenance, that aims to preserve both the living architecture and the stone monument.

The ongoing structural degradation and landscape erosion being faster than earlier due to climate change and lack of resources, there was a need to develop efficient methods to gain good results in wall repair, maintenance, and in care of the earthworks, which is the living architecture of the fortifications. There was also a need to adapt more greens kills. By this Resilient Fortress project, the Governing Body of Suomenlinna wanted to find peer support from colleagues dealing with the same problematic and having ambition in increasing environmental responsibility in a practical level.

Besides management and dissemination of results, the activities implemented in the project took place in four different fortified sites. The first activity was a three-day event Suomenlinna Summer School – the state of art of a resilient fortress, the second activity was an Antibes site visit – a best practice in situ discovery, the third activity was a Mont-Dauphin learning session – a series of theoretical and practical lectures and site visits, and the last activity was the Naarden exchange session, where in between field presentations, lectures a symposium and visits occurred a real professional exchange.

The concrete outputs of Resilient Fortress project are the published Suomenlinna Summer School report (117 pages), the written summaries of each site activity (from 8 to 12 pages) and the Resilient Fortress Guidelines (12 pages). In the guidelines the partners define together that Resilient Fortress philosophy means preserving the fortified monument-landscape and its ecosystem simultaneously. There is also a 13-minute film presenting the Resilient Fortress Erasmus +project in the French site of Monuments nationaux (French and English) and an article on French Monument nationaux’s magazine, as well as an article presenting the project to be published in December 2025 by Vauban Association. The Suomenlinna Summer School increased the national networking in the field of fortified heritage, encouraging the city of Hamina to organize an international seminar together with the Governing Body of Suomenlinna and EFFORTS, the European Federation of Fortified Sites and to coordinate Finnish fortification cooperation. The project increased international cooperation because the project partners are willing to continue exchanging.