House of Nobility

The House of Nobility, known in Finnish as Ritarihuone, reflects an important period in Finland’s political and social history. Completed in 1862, it was built as the meeting place of the noble estate, one of the four groups represented in Finland’s historic Diet. The other estates represented the clergy, the townspeople, and the landowning peasants.

When the Diet assembled in Helsinki in 1863, all four estates used the building for their meetings. This made the House of Nobility Finland’s first parliamentary building. At the time, Finland was a largely self-governing grand duchy within the Russian Empire, and the Diet offered the country a limited but important form of political representation.

The nobility continued to meet here until Finland replaced the four-estate system with a modern, single-chamber Parliament in 1906. The building then remained the home of the Finnish House of Nobility, an organization that preserves the genealogical records, archives, and heraldic traditions of the country’s noble families. Its assembly hall contains hundreds of colorful coats of arms representing those families.  The building preserves the memory of an earlier political system and the gradual development of parliamentary government in Finland.