Helsinki

Helsinki (Swedish: Helsingfors) is the capital and most populous city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About 690,000 people live in the municipality, with 1.3 million in the capital region and 1.6 million in the metropolitan area. As the most populous urban area in Finland, it is the country's most significant centre for politics, education, finance, culture, and research. Helsinki is 80 kilometres (50 mi) north of Tallinn, Estonia, 400 kilometres (250 mi) east of Stockholm, Sweden, and 300 kilometres (190 mi) west of Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Together with the cities of Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen—and surrounding commuter towns, including the neighbouring municipality of Sipoo to the east—Helsinki forms a metropolitan area. This area is often considered Finland's only metropolis and is the world's northernmost metropolitan area with over one million inhabitants. Additionally, it is the northernmost capital of an EU member state. Helsinki is the third-largest municipality in the Nordic countries, after Stockholm and Oslo. Its urban area is the third-largest in the Nordic countries, after Stockholm and Copenhagen. Helsinki Airport, in the neighbouring city of Vantaa, serves the city with frequent flights to numerous destinations in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Helsinki is a bilingual municipality with Finnish and Swedish as its official languages. The population consists of 74% Finnish speakers, 5% Swedish speakers, and 20% speakers of other languages.

Helsinki has hosted the 1952 Summer Olympics, the first CSCE/OSCE Summit in 1975, the first World Athletics Championships in 1983, the 52nd Eurovision Song Contest in 2007 and it was the 2012 World Design Capital. The city is recognized as a "Design City" in 2014 by UNESCO's Creative Cities Network.

Helsinki has one of the highest standards of urban living in the world. In 2011, the British magazine Monocle ranked Helsinki as the world's most liveable city in its livable cities index. In the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2016 livability survey, Helsinki ranked ninth out of 140 cities. In July 2021, the American magazine Time named Helsinki one of the world's greatest places, a city that "can grow into a burgeoning cultural nest in the future" and is already known as an environmental pioneer. In an international Cities of Choice survey conducted in 2021 by the Boston Consulting Group and the BCG Henderson Institute, Helsinki was ranked the third-best city in the world to live in, with London and New York City coming in first and second. In the Condé Nast Traveler magazine's 2023 Readers' Choice Awards, Helsinki was ranked the 4th-friendliest city in Europe. Helsinki, along with Rovaniemi in Lapland, is also one of Finland's most important tourist cities. Due to the large number of sea passengers, Helsinki is classified as a major port city, and in 2017 it was rated the world's busiest passenger port.

According to a theory put forward in the 1630s, at the time of Swedish colonisation of the Finnish coast, colonists from Hälsingland in central Sweden arrived at what is now the Vantaa River and called it Helsingå ('Helsinge River'), giving rise to the names of the village and church of Helsinge in the 1300s. This theory is questionable, as dialect research suggests that the settlers came from Uppland and the surrounding areas. Others have suggested that the name derives from the Swedish word helsing, an archaic form of the word hals ('neck'), which refers to the narrowest part of a river, the rapids. Other Scandinavian towns in similar geographical locations were given similar names at the time, such as Helsingør in Denmark and Helsingborg in Sweden.

When a town was founded in the village of Forsby (later Koskela) in 1548, it was called Helsinge fors, 'Helsinge rapids'. The name refers to the Vanhankaupunginkoski [fi] rapids at the mouth of the river. The town was commonly known as Helsinge or Helsing, from which the modern Finnish name is derived.

Official Finnish government documents and Finnish language newspapers have used the name Helsinki since 1819, when the Senate of Finland moved to the city from Turku, the former capital of Finland. Decrees issued in Helsinki were dated with Helsinki as the place of issue. This is how the form Helsinki came to be used in written Finnish. When Finland became the Grand Duchy of Finland, an autonomous state under the rule of the Russian Empire, Helsinki was known as Gel'singfors (Гельсингфорс) in Russian, because the main and official language of the Grand Duchy of Finland was Swedish.