This little piece of paper is glued to a wall of a ruined house in an abandoned village. I spent a good half an hour exploring this wall and I would spend more, if we weren't supposed to go.
This wall is all about history. It is covered with few layers of old newspapers (in case you're wandering why, this is what people did in the past to get wallpapers better attached to walls: first – newspapers, then – wallpapers). And these newspapers told me a little bit about this village.
The oldest layer is in Finnish, which was very surprising for me as I was pretty sure this wasn't a Finnish territory. And that led me to an amazing discovery – until 1956 there was Karelian-Finnish SSR (one of 16 USSR republics), where Finnish was an official language. I actually never knew there was 16th republic is USSR. So, if it wasn't joint to Russian republic in 1956, the huge part of this Russian North would now be a different country (most likely named Karelia).
The only world I was able to understand from the start was "Hitler". I little bit later I also found something about Roosevelt. Header "Wallacen puhe" as much as I understand means "Wallace's speech" (which together with words "Amerikan episkopaalisen" I found in the article led me to Foy E. Wallace).
Next layer is in Russian and it tells a lot of USSR history. The major USSR newspaper name here is "Pravda n.a. Joseph Stalin". It was renamed to just "Pravda" (which means truth) only several years after his death.
And you can go, and go, and go like this. Each little piece of paper on this wall tells you a story better that any professional guide ever could.
