Koli is a ridge of white quartzite in North Karelia, eastern Finland, and the view east from its crown is the one the country chose as its national landscape. From the bare top of Ukko-Koli, the highest ground in southern Finland, Lake Pielinen is what you climbed for: forest, water and dark scattered islands fading into haze. That composition did its work at a particular moment. As Finland pushed toward independence from Russia around 1900, the painters shaping a national identity kept coming back to this hill. Eero Järnefelt painted it through the 1890s and after, and one of his Koli landscapes became the country's first tourism poster. In 1909 he brought his brother-in-law Jean Sibelius, who counted the visit among the great experiences of his life. The rock under it began as sand, is among the oldest exposed in Europe, and was left standing as white domes after the mountain chain around it was planed flat.
A trail follows the ridge on from Ukko-Koli to Akka-Koli and Paha-Koli, over rock the ice ages polished smooth and past wind-gnarled pines. Each top gives you the same lake from a slightly different angle. The ridge changes twice a year. In late September the ruska, Finland's short blaze of autumn colour, sets the birch and aspen burning yellow and red above the blue water. In deep winter the ridge spruces are loaded with tykky, the heavy crown-snow that bends them into pale silent shapes, and you go up on snowshoes between them. People were climbing here for something else long before any of it was painted. One of the park's crevice caves is called Pirunkirkko, the Devil's Church. A Koli wise man would lead a patient deep into the 34-metre cleft and rouse the devil with shouting and stamping, bargaining aloud for a cure. Its smooth parallel walls ring at a single note and hold a sharp sound for about a second, so your voice does seem to answer out of the stone.