My Escapes Finland Helsinki Cold Helsinki Business Trip Buddy Bears Open-air Statue Exhibition

Buddy Bears Open-air Statue Exhibition

As I walked up to the Helsinki cathedral, I came across a large number of colourful bear statues (made of fiberglass).
Stylish larger than human-size teddy bears. Each one is unique, represents a different country from the World.

These were called the "Buddy Bears", which was a similar initiative to the "CowParade".
It was a surprising sight in an awful weather. It cheered me up, warmed me up, even!

While I was getting soaked by a nasty rain and perforated by chilly Finnish winds, I made sure I checked all bears one-by-one. It was worth the sacrifice...

As I said - each bear was representing an individual country.

This one on the left represents Sudan.

The bears are made of fibreglass and they were originally developed in Berlin, Germany.

Their message is about peace, international understanding and tolerance among nations, cultures, religions around the World.

Oddly, since my visit - Sudan had split into two separate countries: Sudan and South Sudan. All this happened after a horrific war in which tragically almost 900,000 people perished.

These are beautiful and I love the idea of promoting tolerance and peace.

But I think these statues bear limitations.

They represent sovereign recognized countries. And countries are not the same as nations, cultures, religions...

Also: physical representations in the form of a bear would be offensive to Muslims.

So, the display of these bear-representing statues might be considered a blasphemy in very strict Muslim countries.

Anyway... speaking of the statues - some of the statues were really good, even if by design they weren't really representative to the respective country.

It seems some put more accent on art than on giving shape to national characteristics.

The Buddy Bears were all carefully-crafted. I suppose they made a bunch of "blank" fibreglass bears, which were later decorated.

There was a solitary "real bear" shape (not the teddy-bear type on two feet) statue with an Einstein quote on its side. It's a wise statement:

At the end, I could barely escape the flood of rain that was coming from "up there"...

Ditching cracked streets and pools of rainwater I finally managed to jump on a tram without a ticket and it brought me pretty close to the Radisson hotel.

There's even and official site of the Buddy Bears.

Here below you'll find a few more photos of the bears that I saw on that rainy day in Helsinki. I must have spent around 2 hours there admiring them (sometimes running for cover whenever the rain was falling more intensely).

One of the bears was holding a lizard up. That's the Paraguay Bear!

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