Now it is a research outpost of Turku University but Seili has seen it’s fair share of a grim past.
Victoria adds: Seili housed a leper colony until the mid-18th century when the last leper, who had been confined to the island for over 50 years, finally died. The building below was the hospital where they lived (it now houses some kind of university building and a so-called cafe with all the cheer and range of choice one imagines the lepers enjoyed), although as the tourist information poster dolefully informed us, the main point was to isolate the sick from the healthy, not to care for them.
The building also contains a reconstruction of an inmate’s cell. It didn’t say whether the wallpaper was original but I don’t suppose the lepers were the only people with a lot of time on their hands during long winter evenings when a spot of ill-advised interior design can seem alarmingly attractive.
There was also a church with a very nice graveyard containing a small number of plain white crosses with names and dates on. Like the church in Nargu, it appeared to have entered a competition to be as unCatholic as possible, and indeed another poster informed us that a Pietist priest had been more or less exiled here. Apparently he took the Reformation to such an extent that he rejected all the Church’s teachings and when his daughter died refused to let her be buried in the graveyard and instead buried her in his garden. I climbed up the ladder to peer through the windows and was quite surprised that he found anything to object to in the church, which is basically a wooden box. I couldn’t even see an altar from where I was standing.
On Seilli we also met a fellow Austrian sailor who was over 80 but still sailing single-handed through the archipelago. He invited us back to his boat, where we drank wine until late in the evening and were introduced to the most up-to-date navigational software (Wolfgang downloaded it the next day -outdone in tech by an octagenarian!). On the way home, through the twilight, we saw not only an enormous moon but several deer walking through the hospital grounds, who were most surprised to be disturbed by humans during what they clearly regarded as their time.