In 1591 a woman named Elin Knutsdotter died in Naantali, and with her the last living thread of Nådendal Abbey went slack. She had been drawing a royal allowance since 1584, paid by the same crown that had taken the abbey's estates thirty-five years earlier. The order she had entered was forbidden to accept new members; the saints she had been raised to venerate were officially off-limits; the abbess above her had died in 1577. Elin outlasted all of it. She is the reason the abbey's end is dated to 1591 rather than to any of the several earlier years when it was, in every practical sense, already over.
Bishop Maunu II Tavast founded the house in 1438, dedicating it to Saint Bridget, Saint Anna, John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Finding it a home took five years and three attempts. The community first settled around 1440 at the Stenberga estate in Masku, where the ground proved soft and the water bad, then spent a period at Perniö from 1441, and only in 1443 came to rest at Ailos on a sheltered inlet west of Turku. That year King Christopher of Bavaria signed the charter for the town that grew up around it. The Latin name of the abbey - Vallis Gratiae, the Valley of Grace - passed into Swedish as Nådendal and from there into Finnish as Naantali, which is what the town is still called.
Medieval Finland had six monastic houses. Nådendal was the only one that admitted women, and it was a double monastery in the Bridgettine pattern - sisters and brothers on one site, in separate quarters, eating separately, under a single superior who was an abbess. It was not a token presence. A count from 1487 records fifty-four sisters against eight priest-brothers, two deacons and six lay brothers. Their names survive where most medieval Finnish lives do not: Katarina Bengtsdotter, who led the house from 1440; Lucia Olofsdotter Skelge, who died in 1498; Valborg Torkilsdotter; Birgitta Pedersdotter. Through the fifteenth century the crown granted privileges and private donors handed over the income from farm after farm, and the abbey grew rich enough that the crisis of the 1490s - hard winters, plague, failed harvests, collapsing rents - was a wound it never fully closed.
Jöns Budde came to Nådendal as a Bridgettine brother sometime after 1435 and worked there until roughly 1493, translating Latin devotional texts into Swedish. He is the earliest writer known to have put parts of the Bible into Swedish, and he is very nearly the only evidence there is that literary work happened in a Finnish monastery at all - nothing comparable survives from the Dominican or Franciscan houses. His manuscript material was edited and published in 1895 by Oskar Hultman as Jöns Buddes bok. That a man copying out saints' lives on an inlet in the 1470s is now a landmark in the history of the Swedish language is the sort of accident that libraries run on.
The Swedish Reformation did not close Nådendal so much as starve it. Donors, and the families of dead donors, were permitted to reclaim what had been given, and many did; the abbey's assets drained away. New members were banned and existing ones were free to leave, and some left. In 1530 the abbess Valborg Fleming went directly to Gustav I and argued the house's case, winning protection for the property it had held at its foundation and two additional estates besides - a reprieve, and a remarkable piece of nerve. It bought a quarter-century. In 1554 the church silver was carried off and the Lutheran bishop Mikael Agricola arrived to require the remaining members to promise they would be evangelical Christians, would not venerate the saints, and would not read Saint Bridget's revelations in public. In 1556 the estates went to the crown outright. The survivors lived on royal pensions and on gifts from sympathisers such as Anna Hogenskild. When the abbess Birgitta Knutsdotter Kurck died in 1577, four nuns and one monk remained.
Charles IX ordered the abbey buildings pulled down in 1608, and the order was carried out thoroughly. What stands today is the convent church, raised most likely after 1480 and before 1500, with an interior hall of 43.5 by 28.5 metres - the largest church hall completed in medieval Finland. A stray shot near the building in March 1628 started a fire that gutted the interior and took a third of the town with it, but the shell held and the parish rebuilt. Its baroque bell tower, put up between 1794 and 1797 under Mikael Piimänen, was built from the stones of the demolished convent, so the abbey is still physically present in the skyline even though nothing of it is recognisable. Inside are a fifteenth-century Stockholm altarpiece with seventeen carved figures, a wooden crucifix, a pietà, a sacrament cabinet, a stone lavatorium. Under the churchyard park, the rubble foundations of the sisters' and brothers' quarters remain where they fell, probed by excavations in 1872, 1879 and 2005.
The abbey site sits at 60.4715 N, 22.0150 E, on the inlet at Naantali, roughly 14 km west of Turku on the Southwest Finland coast. The church is the tallest thing in the old town and reads well from 1,500 to 2,500 ft, a pale stone mass with a dark tower standing above a grid of low wooden houses, with Kailo island and its pontoon bridge immediately west and the guest harbour below. Turku Airport (EFTU) is about 20 km east-northeast; Helsinki-Vantaa (EFHK) about 160 km east. Long low sun in spring and autumn throws the tower's shadow across the old town roofs and makes the site far easier to pick out than at midday.