There's a contemplative statue of Mikael Agricola in near our hotel in one of the many parks in Lahti. Never having heard of Mikael Agricola before (well... have you?) I was curious to find out who he was and why he deserved to be memorialized in statue form in Lahti. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a direct connection to Lahti (as far as I found), but he is a pretty cool Finnish dude from back in the day.

If Mikael's (1510-1557) surname reminds you of the word "agriculture" that's because it means "farmer" as he took the name when he started his academic career after the vocation of his father. I don't know why we ended that tradition, so many good names came out of it like Cooper, Baker, Smith. And now we'd have even sweeter names like Joe Epidemiologist, Henry Marketing Strategist and Jane Analyst.

Apparently Agricola was around when Sweden and Finland were kind of the same entity (I think I need to brush up on my Scandinavian history) because Gustav Vasa, King of Sweden made Agricola Bishop in 1554. Agricola was a big fan of Martin Luther and the Reformation (finally, something we know about already!) and thus became the first Lutheran Bishop for Finland. But I'm not really into the religious aspect of his life.

Agricola is known as the "Father of Finnish written language" because he played a huge role in standardizing written Finnish. I think he was motivated to do this because he wanted to translate the New Testament into Finnish (so maybe we do care about religion), and the New Testament is his major translation. In order to translate the bible Agricola had to make up a bunch of words so he's also the coiner of many Finnish words currently in use. But all of this makes me wonder why Finnish didn't have an established written form by the time Agricola showed up in the early 16th century? Doesn't that seem a little late to be getting these kinds of things nailed down? What were the Fins doing while everyone else was writing history books and studying Aristotle?