Our History
The history of the establishment of Turku University is very special. When Finland gained independence in 1917, there was only one university, in Helsinki (transferred from Turku in 1828), which functioned mainly in Swedish. The Finnish intelligentsia therefore wished to set up a university which would operate through the medium of Finnish. A nationwide fund-raising campaign was organized, to which altogether 22 040 donors contributed, mainly very ordinary people - artisans, farmers, shopkeepers and teachers. University of Turku was founded in 1920.
To honour the memory of these donors, the University has named its specially created liqueur "22 040". This liqueur has been developed by the University´s own food chemists, and also does homage to some of the distinctive fruits of the Finnish landscape: the cloudberry, the rowan and the sea buckthorn.
There are probably not many universities in the world with their own gold treasure. At the end of the 1940s, the University of Turku received a major bequest from the Johnsson/Joutsen brothers, sons of a smith in the village of Nummenmäki (nowadays incorporated into the Turku city), who had made their fortunes on the Klondike gold field in the Yukon in Canada. The brothers had no heirs, and Karl Fredrik Joutsen bequeathed to the University all his property, including real estate and a gold claim.
By this time the University was outgrowing its original premises, in the Phoenix building on the Market Square. The bequest made it possible to start construction in the 1950s of a new campus on Vesilinnanmäki Hill (now known as the University Hill), and the first building was the new Library.