ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emotional response to the catastrophe that effaced much of the medieval past of the city, destroyed the library of the Academy of Turku almost completely and left 11,000 people homeless. It focuses especially on the question of guilt, which was continuously referred to not only in the trial after the fire but also in the press and, of course, in the streets of the ruined city. The chapter aims at analysing the gendered remembrance of the greatest catastrophe in Finnish urban history. Emilia Julin wrote to her husband on 19 October 1827 and reported what the English newspapers had written about the fire. In fact, the chapter is the study on the Fire of Turku to trace the background of Maria Vass, noticing that she had been born in 1798 and, considering the early nineteenth-century social context, she can by no means be regarded as a young maid.
