Today is Finland’s national “Sleepyhead Day,” a perfectly normal and not-at-all-weird custom celebrated in the country since the Middle Ages. The basic gist is as follows: wake up early or get dumped in the sea. Simple really.
If you’re in Finland on the 27th July and you’re the last in the house still asleep, you can expect to be rudely awoken with water – either by being thrown in the sea or a lake, or simply drenched in your bed. That is the penalty for being the “Sleepyhead”. Every year in the town of Naantali, a celebrity is chosen to be sleepyhead and is thereby dumped into the sea, much to everybody’s delight.
According to SIKUnews, the origin of Sleepyhead Day is to be found in the legend of the Saints of Ephesus who reputedly slept in a cave for 200 years, hiding from persecution by the Roman Emperor Decius.
Since 1709 the day has been observed on 27th July, but the first written record of Sleepyhead Day comes from a hymnal calendar of 1652 when it was celebrated on 27th June.
The day is an ideal publicity platform for The Sleep Union, Finland’s umbrella group of organisations working with sleep disorders. According to the union, over 600,000 Finns suffer from sleeping disorders, often caused by stressful lifestyles and unsuitable sleeping conditions.
Watch out for the union’s events today at Helsinki’s main railway station.
