Qualla: Rauma Old Town Hall

Rauma Old Town Hall: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ROFI44WIK, CC BY-SA 3.0. In autumn 2025, contractors working on the tower of Rauma's old town hall brought down a three-metre iron spike and found it rusted clean through. The spiira had been forged in the 1770s and had stood on the clock tower ever since, and old photographs show that something else once sat on it — a ball at the tip, which disappeared at a date nobody bothered to write down. A forge at Tuusulanjärvi made the replacement for 9,685 euros. The original was kept as a museum object, which was convenient, because the museum is downstairs.

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Image: ROFI44WIK | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rauma Old Town Hall: Four Town Halls and a Habit of Burning

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit aiko99ann, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nothing survives of Rauma's medieval town hall, though it may have stood beside the Church of the Holy Trinity. By the 1500s the town was meeting on the plot next door to the present building, and the researcher Aina Lähteenoja concluded that this hall went up in the town fire of...

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Image: aiko99ann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rauma Old Town Hall: Designed in Turku, Roofed by a Parish Clerk

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kallerna, CC BY-SA 3.0. The design came from Christian Friedrich Schröder, the city architect of Turku, with the Turku master mason Johan Schytt running the actual construction. Rauma's own councillors had a hand in the preliminary sketches, which shows in how conventional the result is: late Baroque in...

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Image: kallerna | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rauma Old Town Hall: Justice Above, Cells Below

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cako, CC BY-SA 2.5. The layout tells you what an eighteenth-century Finnish town hall actually was. Upstairs sat the town court and the magistracy: two session halls, one heated chamber and two unheated ones. Downstairs was rougher — a guard room, two lock-ups, and a shop with its own back rooms, so...

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Image: Cako | CC BY-SA 2.5

Rauma Old Town Hall: The Lace Downstairs

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eteil, CC BY-SA 4.0. Rauma Museum was founded in 1891 and moved into the town hall in 1902, taking only the upper floor at first because the police were still using the ground. When they left in the 1930s, the museum took the whole building. Today the upstairs rooms carry the city's history and the g...

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Image: Eteil | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rauma Old Town Hall: Two Hundred and Fifty

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pjt56, CC BY 3.0. A full restoration began in 2023 under the architect Minna Linnala. The exterior work was completed in November 2025 and the interiors were due to follow in March 2026 — the year the building turns 250. That it survived to have an anniversary is not typical. Eighteenth-century t...

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Image: pjt56 | CC BY 3.0