You have arrived in Rovaniemi which, by area, is Europe's largest city. Rovaniemi is also known as the capital of Lapland, because the administration of the province is concentrated here. The majority of Rovaniemi residents live in the center, but the city also includes 54 villages, the furthest of which is located 90 kilometers from the center.

Today, Rovaniemi is a lively university and tourist city, where people travel from all over the world to experience the northern nature and various tourist experiences. However, its history stretches back across centuries. The area has been inhabited for thousands of years: the first finds of habitation date back to the time immediately after the Ice Age. The settlement history of the current center of Rovaniemi goes back to perhaps around 700 years.

Trading has taken place in Rovaniemi since the Middle Ages, and in that time, the area became a busy traffic and administrative center to the north. Because of trading, Rovaniemi developed a bustling market tradition, which flourished especially at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The first market was organized in 1881.

The arrangement in the exhibition hall of people dressed in fur doing business with each other really captures the atmosphere of the market and the things there for sale. Markets became an important part of the annual cycle of people living in the north, and people traveled to them from all over Lapland.

Important supplies were bought at the market, such as flour, coffee and goldsmith's products. Forest trades were made and business was done at the rectory. The market was an important selling point for local products too, such as reindeer meat and skin, fish, birds, butter and furs.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Rovaniemi market was the center of the fur trade in Finland and the Nordic countries. Furs were exported from Rovaniemi to the courts of Central Europe.

They also had fun at the market. There were strongman shows, carousels, music and dances. At these dances, travelling strangers met, romances were born and engagements were made. With the advent of cameras, travelling cinemas arrived and there were also photographers in the market, who could take portraits of visitors, their families and perhaps newly engaged couples.                                   

One of the most famous photographers working in Lapland was market photographer Valto Pernu. You can see his tent in the exhibition space, next to his green moped. The photography tent was a familiar sight in Rovaniemi's markets from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. Pernu was a versatile photographer who photographed the market guests in a tent studio with his homemade bellows camera and he painted the Lapland landscapes that served as photo backgrounds himself. A Romani couple in 1960s costume has settled in his tent waiting to be photographed.