About Aikapolku
Aikapolku is a discovery service for Finnish cultural heritage, made out of love. This page tells you why we do this, where the information comes from, and how we handle it.
Why we made this
Finland is quietly full of places that have watched the centuries pass — a medieval stone church whose walls were raised in the 1400s, a manor's lime-tree avenue, a sea fortress spread across the islands off Helsinki. Most of them stand a short drive from somewhere you've already been, and most of them you'll never hear about, because they sit in a government register rather than on a map you'd actually browse.
Aikapolku began as a simple wish: to make those places findable, and to make them feel worth the trip. Not a database, and not a search engine — a guide. We want to tell you why a place is worth a detour, what to look for once you're standing in front of it, and how to thread a few of them into a single unhurried day.
We build it carefully and honestly. The facts come from the Finnish Heritage Agency's own records, the photographs from Wikipedia, the maps from OpenStreetMap. Where we add words of our own, they stay tied to the real history — we would rather say nothing than invent a date or a story. More than anything, it is made out of love for Finland's past, and a hope that you'll drive out one Saturday and stand somewhere that has been standing for five hundred years.
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.
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.
We use cookies only for anonymous visitor statistics (Google Analytics), and only with your consent. Feedback and error reports can be sent to hello@aikapolku.com.