The City of Hancock’s annual Juhannus (Midsummer Festival) is the largest Finnish heritage celebration in the Upper Peninsula. Its popularity has attracted international attention to the point that Hancock was selected as the 2026 Finno-Ugric Capital of Culture. Hancock is the first city in the United States to receive the honor, according to Copper Country Finns and Friends Chairman Jim Kurtti.

“It’s the first time they have selected a Finno-Ugric capital of culture outside the indigenous area of the Ugric people,” He said. “They’ve always been in Finland, Estonia or Russia, where the Ugric people live.”

The title of Finno-Ugric Capital of Culture is annually selected by a five-member independent jury on behalf of the URALIC Centre in Estonia. The jury reviews applications with strong Finno-Ugric heritage, like Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, Sámi, to promote their cultures.

Kurtti said Hancock is the first city outside those regions to be selected as a cultural capital, and so is the first in North America.

 Hancock’s pride in its Finnish heritage, as the annual Juhannus festival demonstrates, is very authentic in its mirroring of Finland’s midsummer traditions; the core rituals of fire, water, sauna, and community were directly imported by Finnish immigrants to the Upper Peninsula in the 1800s, when the Quincy Mining Company brought the first Finns to the Upper Peninsula.

The Juhannus celebration marks the longest day of the year (Summer Solstice) and is a time to embrace nature, daylight, and community. It is a national holiday in Finland, held annually on the Saturday between June 20 and June 26, with the primary festivities kicking off on Juhannus Eve, Friday night.

There are, however, some minor differences between the celebrations in Hancock and those of Finland’s. While Finland’s celebration heavily focuses on private nature getaways, Hancock packages these exact cultural pillars into a massive public festival.

In Finland, Juhannus is one of the year’s most cherished holidays. In 2026, it falls on the evening of Friday, June 19, continuing into Saturday. The precise timing allows Finns to experience the near-constant daylight phenomenon known as the “midnight sun.” In northern Finland, the sun doesn’t set at all during this period, while even southern regions experience only a brief twilight for a few hours, says Aurora Cottage, a popular cabin rental business in Lapland, Finland.

Finnair.com says Juhannus is a celebration of light, togetherness and the height of summer. Most Finns leave the city and head to a summer cottage by a lake or the Baltic Sea, where the weekend is shaped by sauna, a dip in the water and long meals eaten outdoors under a sky that barely dims.

The bonfire, called kokko, is one of the oldest midsummer traditions. Lit by the water as evening approaches, it marks the turning of the season. Kokko is perhaps the most visually striking tradition. The bonfires, says Aurora, represent purification and protection, traditionally believed to ward off malevolent forces that might threaten crops and livestock. Their burning simultaneously symbolizes fertility – for land, animals, and people – with flames reaching skyward as messengers to deities. Communities gather around these towering flames, often built on floating platforms in lakes, creating spectacular reflections on the water while symbolically driving away evil spirits and ensuring good harvests.

Originally the celebrations honored Ukko, the ancient Finnish god of sky, weather, and harvests, Aurora Cottage reports. Pre-Christian Finns gathered to ensure fertility for crops and livestock through rituals designed to harness the power of the longest day. When Christianity arrived in Finland, the celebration was adapted to commemorate St. John the Baptist (Johannes in Finnish, which evolved into “Juhannus”), whose feast day conveniently fell near the summer solstice.

Despite these Christian influences, many of the traditional pagan elements remained, reflecting Finns’ profound connection to nature. Today’s Juhannus celebrations blend these ancient traditions with modern festivities, creating a quintessentially Finnish experience that celebrates light, nature, and communal bonds after the long, dark winter months.

The most traditional way to spend Midsummer is at a cottage by the water, says Finnair. For many Finns, that means the lake district: Saimaa, Päijänne and the thousands of smaller lakes across central and eastern Finland offer the landscape most closely tied to the celebration. Solstice festivals include art and music, and there are also Midnight Sun film festivals.

These traditions came gradually to Hancock, which was platted by the Quincy Mining Company in 1859. It was the Quincy company that brought the first Finns to the Copper Country in the 1860s in an effort to alleviate a labor shortage it was suffering to the extent it was inhibiting copper production.

In the spring of 1864, the company sent one of its office workers to Norway to recruit skilled laborers from the mining districts in that country. It was probably this office employee who had come up with idea of recruiting Norwegian workers. His name was Christian Taftes and he was an immigrant from the Tornio River Valley of Norway; he spoke both Swedish and Finn fluently and he knew the mining districts there.

A few months later, over 100 of Taftes’ recruits arrived in Hancock. Most of them were Norwegians from the Kaafjord and Alten mines of Finmarken and Tornio. Among the Norwegian recruits were a few Swedes, but also a few Finns.

From those first Finns who had arrived at the dock in Hancock as part of Taftes’s Norwegian recruitment effort, letters home discussed an abundance of work at good wages, the varieties of fish and game, and even of possibilities of free homestead land. Michigan sounded very good to a people most of whom had known little other than poverty, famine, and increasing Russian oppression. Those few Finns who arrived at the Hancock dock were the vanguard of thousands of Finns that would soon follow.

While Finns make up just 0.9% of Michigan’s population, the concentration of Finns in the U.P. is greater than 50 times the national average, making them the largest ancestral group in many U.P. counties.

Michal M. Loukinen, sociology professor at Northern Michigan University, wrote in his essay, Cultural Tracks: Finnish Americans in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula:

“A distinctive feature of this region is that one of the smallest of the Euro-American ethnic groups in America is one of the largest ethnic groups in the U.P. Americans reporting “Finnish Ancestry” in the 1990 U.S. Census totaled 658,870, about three-tenths of one percent the national population. In the UP, the corresponding figure was 51,214 persons, amounting to 16.3 percent of the U.P.’s population of 313,915 people. Hence, the UP has more than (50) times the proportion of Finnish Americans as the nation.”