7W86+6C Luzhki, Leningrad Oblast, Russia
Mikael Agricola is a national Finnish hero. An enlightener, creator of the Finnish alphabet and founder of the Finnish literary language, translator of the Bible into Finnish, church reformer. All of this is one man.
Agricola was born in 1510, became a priest in 1531, and went to Germany, where the Reformation was actively underway at the time. Agricola left still a Catholic, but returned a Lutheran, having first communicated in Germany with the disciples of Martin Luther, and then with Luther himself. For those unaware – Martin Luther is one of the founders of the Reformation and Lutheranism.
Agricola returned to Sweden, which became a Lutheran country. In 1556, Mikael Agricola, already a bishop, went on a royal embassy of King Gustav Vasa to Moscow, to Ivan the Terrible. The negotiations were about peace after yet another Russo-Swedish conflict. The embassy was returning in the spring of 1557; it was cold and wet, Agricola fell ill and died in a fisherman's hut near the gulf. According to one version, this happened at Cape Kyrenniemi.
Agricola was buried in Vyborg, but his grave was lost. And the day of his death – April 9 – Finns consider a national holiday: Mikael Agricola Day, or Finnish Language Day.
The first monument at Cape Kyrenniemi was erected at the very beginning of the 20th century by the youth society Koivisto, but later, during the war, it was lost; only a stone with an inscription was kept in the Vyborg Local History Museum. In 2000, the monument was restored and now stands on the shore of the Gulf of Finland. Around it is a whole cluster of fishermen’s cottages and moorings.
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