Sunday, June 22, 2014

Battle of Porrassalmi 1789 225th anniversary re-enactment footage

I went to a re-enactment a week ago. It was the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Porrassalmi, an obscure engagement in an obscure war but it happened in my home province so of course I'm interested. I have a whole book on the battle in my bookcase!

Anyway, I've never done any video editing and I had a bunch of footage and pictures I took with my camera so I thought this would be a good opportunity to train myself and educate you people at the same time. Let me know how I did!

The Embed is really small, watch it straight from youtube or in fullscreen mode to get a bigger picture:


The lay of the land.

Savo jägers taking a break

The commander of the Savonian brigade and a veteran of the war of American independence, Curt Von Stedingk arrives to oversee the defenses.

The defenders had two guns behind log breastworks.


Russian grenadiers.
Karelian dragoons having a break.

The defenders' forwars skirmishers.

Savonian jägers waiting for the fighting to start.
The Russian advance force engages the jägers.

 The video has all my material on the attack of the grenadiers at his point.


After being repulsed from the breastworks, the grenadiers retreat back across the strait.
The victorious defenders.


The after battle crowd at the strait was closer to the real attack in scale.
After the re-enactment there was a honorary ceremony at a monumant erected on site.
A Swedish court chaplain and a living relative of Georg Carl Von Döbeln, Erland Ros played the role of his ancestor
After being shot in the head, Von Döbeln, confident he was going to die anyway, insisted on writing his after action report before surgery. His blood is spilled on this original document currently on display in Mikkeli.

There's some nice additional footage here while the link exists: http://www.lansi-savo.fi/uutiset/l%C3%A4hell%C3%A4/video-tykkien-pauhua-porrassalmen-sotan%C3%A4yt%C3%B6ksess%C3%A4-161727

Also, if you wish to know more, here's a couple of links on the subject matter:

http://visitmikkeli.fi/en/campaign/curt-von-stedingk-and-porrassalmi-225
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Swedish_War_%281788%E2%80%9390%29

1 comment:

  1. Do you know if the Swedish Smaland Kavalry regiment participated in this battle? I dont read swedish or russian. I also don't know if you get notifications from comments on old posts! But if you could shoot me an email, i'd greatly appreciate it. jimholm@yahoo.com

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