From Viipuri With Love

A sentimental journey of a morning suit, in three parts

Part I

In the fall of 1934, in the city of Viipuri in Finnish Karelia, Engineer Y. Pitkänen wakes up to a realization that he is in need of a morning suit. He strolls down to Karjalankatu, where several clothing stores are located alongside the artist-favored Hotel Knut Posse, and pops in to see V. Turtiainen, one of the city’s 30 tailors. The tailor recommends the fabric: a sophisticated thick black wool for the trousers and the vest, and a heavier, slightly more textured black wool for the jacket. The lining for the vest and the inner workings of the trousers will be made of champagne color cotton twill. For the lining of the jacket they choose a shimmery rayon: black for the main body and white for the sleeves. They begin to take measurements of Pitkänen’s tall, slender frame. In the following months they meet for fittings and picking out the buttons and the other haberdashery, and on the 7th of December, 1934, the suit is ready for pick-up.

Less than five years later a war breaks out between Finland and The Soviet Union. Tailor Turtiainen’s shop is still there, in Karjalankatu, in the city of Viipuri, which is the fourth largest city of Finland. Due to the city’s close proximity to the Soviet border, the entire population, all 70,000 of them, is evacuated to safety. In a harsh peace pact the following year, Viipuri, alongside the entire Finnish part of the Karelian Isthmus, is lost to the Soviet Union. The residents of Viipuri, including V. Turtiainen, have become refugees and they can never return home. 

In the summer of 2024, vintage enthusiast Tiia VM takes a roadtrip to the city of Salo in southwestern Finland. While browsing through racks and racks of clothes at a flea market, she comes across a thick wool suit that she mistakes for evening tails. She can tell that the fabric is old, but because menswear is not her specialty, she has trouble figuring out how old the suit is. To her the buttons look like they’re probably made of plastic rather than bakelite, so she thinks that perhaps the suit is from the 1950s. It’s very heavy though, and the hand sewn finishing at the back seam of the trousers reminds her of a pair of 1940s wool trousers she has at home. She tries the suit on, it fits, and she decides to buy it for her collection of vintage clothes she has little intention of ever wearing. At home she inspects the suit and finds a tag sewn on the back of a trouser pocket. 

V. Turtiainen, In Viipuri 7th day of the 12th month 1934. Engineer Mr Y Pitkänen

In the fall of 1934, in the Finnish city of Viipuri, Engineer Y. Pitkänen wakes up to a realization that he is in need of a morning suit… 

1934 morning suit

Fabric details / Inside the trousers

Part II

The tailor’s tag stopped me in my tracks for two reasons. First, the morning suit was quite a bit older than I had anticipated, and second, the suit was made in the city of Viipuri in Finnish Karelia. A lot of Finns have an emotional bond with the city and the lands that Finland lost to The Soviet Union in the Second World War. My paternal great-grandparents and their ancestors were all born in Finnish Karelia. Both of my grandfathers fought on the Karelian front in the war. I immediately wanted to know more about the maker and the owner of the morning suit, and how it traveled all the way from 1930s Viipuri into my life today.

I googled V. Turtiainen, the tailor, and was first able to track down the tailor’s shop by finding a 1939 bill of exchange that an antique shop was selling online. The bill revealed the tailor shop’s address: Karjalankatu 19 in Viipuri. After investigating the Virtual Viipuri site, which has recreated the streets of pre-war Viipuri, I found out that the V. Turtiainen tailor shop operated in the same street address as many other garment makers of the city and a fancy hotel, Hotel Knut Posse, that had been opened on New Year’s Day of 1930. This is the street where V. Turtiainen and Y. Pitkänen had met in the fall of 1934, to discuss making the suit.

Karjalankatu 19 in Viipuri in the 1930s

The tailor, V. Turtiainen, was referred to in a handful of online sources only by his first initial V. After some digging I found a personal blog that had published the entire city of Viipuri phone book from the year 1938. In it, I discovered that Turtiainen’s first name was Vihtori. The phone book gave his line of work (tailor), business address in Karjalankatu 19, as well as his home address: Repolankatu 7. It turns out that in 1938 Vihtori lived in the famous Lallukka building that housed both artists and private residents and was considered one of the most beautiful buildings of the city at the time. It is still standing today and operates as an artists’ residence.

Lallukka House in Repolankatu 7, Viipuri, in the early 1900s.

In trying to find out more about Vihtori Turtiainen, I came across a Karelia database with birth and death records as well as confirmation and marriage records of the people of Finnish Karelia before the 1939 war. By punching in the name, I found two hits for Viktor Turtiainen in the Finnish Karelia region who were born in the early 1900s, but no Vihtori. As Finland’s national identity was being imagined and forged in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, international names like Viktor were often converted into Finnish ones. It was possible or even likely that in his adult years a Viktor might have changed his name to its Finnish equivalent, Vihtori. I pressed on, and looked into the two Viktors I had found.

The Viktors had very different paths in life. One was born on March 22nd, 1901 in the small town of Elisenvaara, a son of a doctor. The other was born on September 21st, 1902 in the poor fishing village of Ino, to a family of crofters (tenant farmers). The crofter’s son committed suicide by knife in 1928, while the doctor’s son lived and became a member of the editing team of Vaatturi, the professional magazine for Finnish tailors, in the mid-1920s. I now had enough information to confirm that I had found my tailor. 

I still don’t know much about Vihtori Johannes Turtiainen, also known as Viktor Johannes. The Karelia database had no information of him ever marrying or having children. A genealogy site revealed that he passed away on May 10th, 1952, at the age of 51, in Joensuu, close to the Soviet border. His closest immediate family were his seven siblings. I wasn’t able to find any records of Vihtori opening up another tailor shop after he fled Viipuri during the war. But I do have a photograph of him.

Vihtori Johannes Turtiainen (1901 - 1952)

As for the engineer who bought the suit, I have found nothing. Pitkänen is a very common last name in Finland - every 600th Finn is a Pitkänen. The Karelia database had so many male Pitkänens with the initial Y who were alive in the Karelia region in the 1930s that it is practically impossible to narrow them down, especially since I only have a partial name to go by. The 1938 Viipuri phone book had no listing for Y. Pitkänen. Perhaps he had moved out of the city by then, and earlier phone books are not available online. I haven’t been able to find a historical database for Finnish engineers, which could have been a start. There were engineers’ offices in Viipuri in the 1930s, but I can’t find a mention of Y. Pitkänen in that connection either. I can only assume that Y. Pitkänen survived the war time, just like his morning suit did. Somehow his suit ended up in Salo, in the southwestern part of Finland.

I’m intrigued by the man whom I can’t trace. From the shape of the suit I can tell that Y. Pitkänen was tall: the average height for a Finnish male in the 1920s was 5’5”, but the suit is tailored for someone 5’10”-5’11”. Black morning suits were worn for formal daytime events, sometimes with a top hat, gloves and a cane. In Finland in the 1930s this type of suit was often worn to a wedding. The pocket square that came with the suit is a folded flower-embroidered woman’s handkerchief. Maybe Y. Pitkänen got married in his suit, and the suit survived because it had an emotional meaning to him. I can only guess.

Part III

If civilization as we know now is still standing in 90 years’ time, I’m trying to imagine if any of my clothes will still exist. While researching the morning suit I realized that my clothes don’t bear names. No one could attempt to research or track down the people who made my clothes: where they lived, when they were born, or when they died. With the passing of time, designers’ names on clothing labels become brand names, and brand names are just brand names. The tags that say “Made in Finland”, “Made in Belgium” or “Made in China” almost seem to indicate that making clothes is a passive endeavor without a subject or a tangible place. Clothes get made. No one makes them. Our current clothes are nameless, and the stories that are associated with them will die when we, or the people we are personally connected to, do. 

Sometimes at the flea market I come across clothes that have the owner’s name crudely written on the neck tag with a textile marker. These clothes were owned by people who ended up in nursing homes or other institutions. The clothes were marked so that they’d find their way back to their owner after laundry day. I always feel a little sad when I see these clothes. They were the last clothes that someone wore as their life had become sedentary, quieted, already lived. 

Most of my antique and vintage clothes don’t carry people’s names or initials. The morning suit is the exception. In some ways all of my old clothes could be almost as nameless and storyless as my modern clothes. What the old clothes have is a feeling, a something-something, and a visible presence of the human hand. That offsets the fact that I don’t know who made them or wore them. Having said that, the two names on the morning suit, the man who made it and the man who wore it, have made my brain buzz. I’m glad to have been able to track down Vihtori Turtiainen. It’s very special to know whose hands crafted my morning suit in the city of Viipuri, in Finnish Karelia, 90 years ago. 

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