Did you know?

It might come as a surprise for tango connoisseurs and students studying Spanish in Argentina, but the world�s oldest tango festival is not held in either Buenos Aires or Montevideo. This popular style of dance, the trademark of both Argentina and Uruguay, captured European attention in the early years of the twentieth century, as the tango craze swept contagiously though Paris, London, Berlin and the other major European capitals of culture.

Yet the Tangomarkkinat is the world�s oldest tango festival, and if you thought that name sounded distinctly Finnish, then you�d be right! The festival, apparently, had its origins in a Finnish sauna, so about as far from the sweltering heat of the rough-and-tumble regions of Buenos Aires as you could imagine! Held early every July in Sein�joki, Finland, the Tangomarkkinat admittedly dates back only to 1985, which coincides with the resurgence of interest in the dance form from the French in Paris and the rest of the world following the Paris opening of the Tango Argentino show in 1983. The Finnish variation of the Argentine tango, however, established itself as early as the 1930s. Tango was first brought to Finland, like the rest of Europe, in the 1910s, but it took a little while for Finnish writers and composers to adopt their own national themes to the emergent Finnish tango.

It might seem strange that tango didn�t catch on to this extend for the French in France and English in England, yet it caught on in Finland due to the compatibility with Finnish folklore. Dr. Pirjo Kukkonen suggests in Tango Nostalgia: The Language of Love and Longing (Helsinki University Press 1996) that tango lyrics reflect �the personality, mentality and identity of the Finnish people in the same way as folk poetry does.� Finnish tango is characterised by its use of minor keys, metaphors expressing the seasonal natural cycles of Finland, and a longing for a faraway land of happiness or the familiarity of the old homestead.

� you learn something every day!