Qualla: Russarö Lighthouse

Russarö Lighthouse: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jumilla, CC BY 2.0. Finnish sailors gave it a name that has outlasted three regimes: *Hangon silmä*, the Eye of Hanko. It has been open for more than a century and a half, four white flashes every forty-five seconds from a red octagonal tower standing on a low granite skerry a few miles south of Finland's southernmost town. What has closed instead is everything around it. The island of Russarö belongs to the Finnish Defence Forces, the door at the base of the tower is shut to visitors, and the eye keeps watching a stretch of water that every ship bound for the Gulf of Finland must cross.

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Image: Jumilla | CC BY 2.0

Russarö Lighthouse: Before the Light

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kansallisarkisto, CC BY 2.0. Something has been standing on this rock since 1815 — first unilluminated daymarks, shapes painted and raised purely to be recognised in daylight, then early lighthouses. A navigator coming up from the Baltic in the years before the present tower had to identify the skerry by sil...

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Image: Kansallisarkisto | CC BY 2.0

Russarö Lighthouse: Built to Burn in January

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jumilla, CC BY 2.0. The present tower went up in 1863: brick and mortar over a granite base, octagonal in plan, five storeys, rising 21 metres with its light 34.2 metres above the sea. The paintwork is a red tower over a base left the colour of the stone. What made it genuinely unusual was not the h...

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Image: Jumilla | CC BY 2.0

Russarö Lighthouse: The First of December, 1939

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jumilla, CC BY 2.0. By the 1930s the island carried Finnish coastal artillery — heavy 234-millimetre guns sited to command the approaches. On 1 December 1939, the second day of the Winter War, the Soviet light cruiser *Kirov* came south of Hanko with the destroyers *Stremitelny* and *Smetlivy* and e...

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Image: Jumilla | CC BY 2.0

Russarö Lighthouse: A Closed Island, a Long Record

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kansallisarkisto, CC BY 2.0. Russarö remained a military island and remains one. That closure has had one civilian by-product: the Finnish Meteorological Institute's weather station here has been recording an exposed, unshadowed patch of the outer Baltic for decades, and the numbers describe a place with a g...

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Image: Kansallisarkisto | CC BY 2.0

Russarö Lighthouse: Close Enough to See

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jumilla, CC BY 2.0. In summer, day cruises run out to Russarö from Hanko's Eastern Harbour, and passengers can walk a little of the island. What they cannot do is climb the tower. The interior has deteriorated badly enough that entry is no longer permitted, so the Eye of Hanko is now something to be...

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Image: Jumilla | CC BY 2.0