By Sotiris Makrygiannis.

The Finnish pavilion at the Paris 1900 World Fair was an important national milestone. Ten years before the start of the new century, a team of 5 Finnish artists, began their work to put Finland on the Global map. The country, under Russian administration, had limited autonomy, so it was an issue of National pride to place Finland into the World Fair as a single independent entity.


They built a garage. Now days is called “Temple of the Soul of Finland” and was constructed in 1900 as a crowdsourcing effort. Sibelius didn’t have the money, so he had to travel from Helsinki to Paris by organizing concerts, gathering money and investing them back to the Temple. So beyond the bootstrapping like real start-ups, they had a mission, and they accomplish that fantastically. The Finnish pavilion is recorded in history books as “claimed the most revolutionary exhibit with its clean-cut, simple and careful details”

Fast forward in 1990 and Russia economy that supported Finland for long is collapsing. Finns are in desperate need for a breathing air. A team of 5 wonderful artists of business started another garage and placed Finland back on the world map as a country of innovation. Their efforts helped Finland to be globalized and from my point of view their achievement as great of those who made the “Temple of the Soul of Finland”.

Things in life are not always going in a straight line but in zig-zag and the glorified days ended with a social drama, not like what the Finns experienced with the own civil war, 100 years ago the same time. But bad anyway, something like a curse that a nation must collectively pay every x period.

A few days ago, I spotted a trend, a group called “Beyond Nokia” was registering 1000 new users per day and followed the line to see what is going on.

I saw LOVE for a company. Maybe there didn’t care on what fortune was given to them, but they did care about what they have given to the world. Is the fact that Nokia phones and networks, and technologies that many people don’t even know a Nokia mind created, connected Humanity faster and better than anyone before. A true achievement on a planetary scale. Currently, the group is trending with 310k people discussing it on Facebook and massive coverage by Techcrunch. The love is burning, underneath a volcano, it seems.

Even in Apple history, there was a point that company was on the brink of bankruptcy but still loved fanatically by their consumers and they did huge mistakes too.

So they said, don’t look back and focus on the future. Sure thing, that’s is the reality, but one should remember humanities’ milestones and good corporate performance.

Because corporations are a group of artists that they can collectively create masterpieces, or nightmares.

Being nostalgic, remembering past victories is not a bad thing, especially when you remember five fantastic artists enabling an army of Nokia people creating world wide successes for many decades.

Finland’s national day is ahead of us, on the 6th of December, I wish to all European friends in Finland, more victories ahead! As for the rest of us, let’s create for them a memory album of why Nokia changed our life’s at

Note: The picture is of a Finnish artist. A painting about 3 boys pushing a paper boat to see how far it can go, by Albert Edelfelt.