Heritage Since 1838

There are many kinds of material relating to the fire brigade's past and present gathered into the Heritage Room of The Turku Volunteer Fire Brigade (VFB): documents, artefact objects, and photographs from the course of the VFB's long history. Displayed stands the material related to extinguishing just as that to the VFB's locally significant entertainment and cultural engagement. Apart from helmets, however, the collection does not include actual firefighting equipment. Thus, the Heritage Room is not an actual fire museum, rather a heritage collection displaying this fire brigade's own heritage and operational engagement.

The room is situated within the Turku VFB House finished in 1892. This prominent fire brigade house deserves in this context special notation. The house, in addition to the fire brigade's own occasions, used to be the town's most important concert and banquet hall, for long, and still remains in the same type of use. Lots of key persons of Finland's cultural history have been guests as performers there, and so have well-known international artists, as well. Since The Turku VFB is Finland's first fire brigade, and nowadays also Scandinavia's oldest still operational volunteer fire brigade, the Turku VFB House is already in itself a significant part of Finnish fire brigade cultural history.

translated from Finnish to English by Péter Volford