During my trip to Finland in September 2024, I visited the “Unkurin talo,” the cabin of a Finnish-born man named Matti Unkuri.
The cabin is one of several structures from overseas Finns, who sent back their homes to Finland in their entirety—from Australia, Canada, and Russia. They make up the primary outdoor displays of a lovely museum called Siirtolaisuusmuseo, or Finnish Migration Museum, in the town of Peräseinäjoki, in central Finland.
I meant to come here in September 2023, during my first ever trip to this land of my ancestors. However, I ran out of time. This occasion, in September 2024, the museum fit perfectly on my travel route. My Finnish aunt who lived nearby in the city of Kurikka had encouraged me to come here.
At the museum, I learned Matti was exiled from a prison in then-Russian-controlled Finland, in the city that is now called Turku. The occupying military forces gave him a chance at redemption. He could help settle a sparsely populated area in Siberia, east of the Ural Mountains, in the 1870s in a community called Bugene, near Omsk.
My storyteller of this fabulous tale of a Finnish man and his frontier home, was Paula, one of the museum managers. She is also the wife of one of my biological uncles who I met in February 2024, when we all had dinner together as family. It seems that all roads of my kin were leading to Peräseinäjoki this late summer day.
Paula told me that Matti had murdered another man in the 1870s. Who knows why. At that time, knife fights in Finland were well documented, especially in the region called South Ostrobothnia. This is a farming area where my Finnish relatives come from, including this branch of the Unkuri clan. I am related to the Unkuris. They are among my blood relatives I can trace on my Finnish family tree, including a cousin I stayed with on this trip.
It turns out the Unkuri clan I’m connected to by bloodline is also connected to this same Matti Unkuri, who built the cabin with his family after he was exiled.
Matti stayed in his new Siberian home, raised over 10 kids, and then died in his land of exile, far from his homeland, like so many other Finns. The surviving members of the Unkuri family from Russia recently had the cabin shipped to the museum in Peräseinäjoki.
As I toured the sparse interior of the sturdy log house, I was impressed how well it was built. It is still a sturdy building, and one could see from the simple, wooden furniture how hard life was on the Siberian frontier, trying to raise a family.
Seeing this cabin, moved from central Asia back to Finland, also made me think about how we are all connected to the furthest places in the world by blood kinship.
Inside this nearly 150-year-old wooden building, my distal relative lived with his family and then died. I made me think about how tough they were too, to endure a harsh winter environment, with few amenities. Central Siberia was not the easiest place to carve out a new life, even as redemption from prison life. It remains a tough place to live today.
The cabin also made me think about blood ties of biological families. These can stretch like tentacles, far across the world. No matter how far apart we are separated by miles, borders, conflicts, languages, and cultures, we all have blood relations and kin ties that bind us together in common families that make us all human.
Though Russians and Finns fought a horrific conflict in World War II that lasted five years in two separate wars, here they were, connected by marriage to each other, and by kinship, I’m connected to both sides too.