The most beautiful interior in central Helsinki, in an Engel-designed building immediately north of the cathedral. The 1845 Rotunda, a circular reading room ringed by three storeys of book stacks under a coffered dome, is one of the great neoclassical library rooms anywhere. The newer wings include a separate Slavonic library — for two centuries the National Library held the legal-deposit copy of every book published in the Russian empire, an obligation that survived independence.
Free to enter; bring photo ID for the reading rooms. The bookshop sells reproductions of historic Finnish maps and prints.