only a few examples of intact wooden city centers survive to this day (for example Old Rauma). Some individual buildings remain controversial to this day when it comes to their demolition in the decades after the war. For example, the building of Hotel Phoenix that stood on corner of Kauppatori was torn down to make way for a large, multistory apartment building in 1959. The building was significant both for its location and history: having stood on one of the most valuable lots in the city centre since 1878 the building had for example served as the first main building of the University of Turku. Other buildings whose demolition was seen as scandalous either already at the time of action or proved to be so in later years include The Nobel House (subject to the very first photograph ever taken in Finland) and the building of Old Hotel Börs (almost directly opposite to Hotel Phoenix, Old Hotel Börs was built in jugendstil in 1909 by Frithiof Strandel).
The Finnish name Turku originates from an Old East Slavic word, tǔrgǔ, meaning "market place". The word turku still means "market place" in some idioms in Finnish. The Swedish word for "market place" is tog, and was probably borrowed from Old East Slavic, but it was present already in Old Swedish.
The Swedish name Åbo seems easy to explain, as it contains the words å ("river") and bo ("nest, dwelling") which could mean something like "the house by the river". However, etymologists think this explanation is probably false, as the name is old and there are no other similar names. There is however an old legal term called "åborätt" (meaning roughly "right to live at"), which gave citizens (called "åbo") the inheritable right to live at land owned by the crown.
It has been suggested that the Finnish name Turku originally refers to the market place, while the Swedish name Åbo originally refers to the castle.
In Finnish, the genitive of Turku is
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