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Written by Kari Reinikainen Kari Reinikainen
Category: Products & services Products & services
Published: 30 January 2018 30 January 2018

 Aboa Mare, the Finnish nautical academy, recently celebrated its 200th anniversary and it has just published a chronicle to celebrate the event.

The chronicle, titled “Aboa Mare 200 år”, is a documentation of Finland’s oldest vocational training, master training in Turku. The maritime training started in 1813. After this, the academy has changed its name often, but the training has been ongoing ever since.

The chronicle, consisting of some 500 pages, presents many signi cant people such as teachers, students and principals from the entire period of the academy’s operation. The reader is given an indication of how the maritime sector and training have been developed during the various phases of the academy.

The book also showcases the buildings where training has been held during these two hundred years, e.g. the observatory on Vartiovuori hill in Turku, where the maritime school operated for over 130 years. The book was funded by Stiftelsen för Åbo Akademi and it was written by maritime journalist and editor of Sjöfartstidningen magazine, Pär-Henrik Sjöström.

The book was published on 12.1.2018, and it is written in Swedish. The English edition will come out during the spring 2018.The book publishing event attracted many attendees from the maritime industry

The Shanty Singers choir started the event by singing songs from the sailboat era to some hundred attendees in Aboa Mare on January 12, 2018. After that the current Head of Maritime Academy and Training Center, Per-Olof Karlsson, made a welcoming speech and soon writer Pär-Henrik Sjöström and former principal Bo Gyllenberg were also given the floor.

The speeches showed that principals at any era have had to work hard to acquire sufficient funding for maritime training, for example, the first principal August Hannibal Hagelstam had ordered too many pencils for his students, so he had to pay the excess from his own salary. Since then, funding has grown despite di cult economic times.

“Today, the Academy is doing well due to the external course offering and simulator training, Sjöström said.Maritime training in Turku is nowadays marketed with the name Aboa Mare, which is known both in Finland and abroad. Now, Aboa Mare has more than 400 students and some 1700 course participants annually. The academy is also active in many research and development projects.