About Aikapolku

What Aikapolku is and who it is for

Aikapolku is a web service that gathers Finland's cultural heritage sites — ancient monuments, built heritage, castles, manors, churches, and UNESCO World Heritage sites — on a single map and makes them easy to find for weekend travellers, local-history enthusiasts, and anyone who wants to explore Finland's history in place.

We provide each site's basic information, its location on the map, and tools for planning weekend itineraries. We do not replace the deeper historical knowledge offered by the Finnish Heritage Agency, museums, or local guides — we aim to help you find the sites you want to learn more about.

Data source

Site basics — name, location, category, dating, and the Finnish Heritage Agency's registered description — come from the agency's Kyppi register (Cultural Environment Service Window). Kyppi is Finland's official cultural-environment information service and contains over 30,000 sites across the country.

We use the Kyppi register's open APIs (WFS) and refresh the data regularly. Every individual site page includes a direct link to the same site in the Kyppi register so you can verify the original source and read more detailed metadata.

Museovirasto's data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This means the data may be used and adapted freely as long as the original source is credited. We credit the Finnish Heritage Agency on every site page and every category page.

• Kyppi — Cultural Environment Service Window
• Finnish Heritage Agency
• CC BY 4.0 licence

Editorial method

Aikapolku shows what the Kyppi register actually contains — we do not invent missing information. If a site's description is missing from the register, we show a note asking you to verify the information on the Heritage Agency's site or in person, not an AI-generated fabrication. If a site is a protected monument that is not marked in the terrain, we say so plainly.

We have deliberately decided not to use large language models to generate site descriptions. Even if AI can produce readable text, it does not know the precise history of an individual Finnish site and cannot distinguish fact from plausible-sounding sentences. In heritage data the risk is too high — incorrect information about a site's age or use is easily left visible.

Our editorial value lies in structuring the data and making it discoverable: grouping sites by category and locality, building maps and filters, and planning weekend trips. The historical background of a site always comes from the Finnish Heritage Agency or from the site itself.