The Northern Voices — Nordic and Baltic stories, people, and gatherings across North America

On 27 August the Helsinki Court of Appeal overturned a ruling that had let the crew of the tanker Eagle S walk away from the Estlink 2 cable cut on jurisdictional grounds. It is the most consequential legal development yet in a three-year pattern of damage to Baltic Sea cables and pipelines — and the question it turns on is not who did it, but whether anyone can be tried for it.

Three migrations, four neighbourhoods, and a claim worth examining. Chicago's Lithuanians built parishes, a hospital, a newspaper that has printed since 1909 and an archive holding 300,000 pages from the displaced-persons camps — then moved to the suburbs. A look at what the community actually built, what it lost, and why the phrase “largest outside Lithuania” needs handling with care.

In 2023 a Michigan university founded in 1896 closed, and the largest Finnish-American archive in the world came very close to being dispersed. It was bought, building and all, by a foundation that raised $5.5 million from 900 donors. That story is the reason to publish a directory: here is where the North is actually kept in the United States and Canada, what each place holds, and which ones you have to phone first.

Sauna is having a moment in North American cities, sold as recovery, longevity and cold-plunge discipline. It has been here since the 1880s, built by Finnish miners on the Iron Range and in the Upper Peninsula, where a public sauna in Virginia, Minnesota served the community from about 1912. UNESCO inscribed Finnish sauna culture in 2020 — and what it inscribed was not the heat.

Estonians once kept a season for the dead rather than a day — weeks in late autumn when the souls came home, food was left out, and nobody worked. It is among the first things a diaspora loses, because there is nothing in the North American calendar to hang it on. Valev Laube on hingedeaeg, what it actually asked of people, and why it is worth reconstructing.

The first generation carries it, the second half-carries it, the third has the recipes but not the hands. An American historian named this pattern in 1938 and it has held up uncomfortably well. Valev Laube on what actually survives across three generations, what is lost first, and why the third generation is not failing at something — it is doing something else.

Sweden elects its Riksdag on 13 September. Swedish citizens abroad could vote by post from 30 July and in person at missions from 20 August — but the embassy in Ottawa stopped taking votes on 4 September, and a ballot posted from North America now is unlikely to arrive in time. A look at how out-of-country voting quietly fails, and what is still possible.