Thanks for the cheers, folks! But I have to disappoint you a bit: Kalevala's Day - or The Day of Finnish Culture - is noted as a day of speeches, concerts, performances, first publishings etc, but not yet as a national holiday here.

An epic like Kalevala is worth a national holiday, methinks, even though you have to keep in mind that Kalevala (~'stead of Kaleva', a legendary hero of the Finns) really is a compilation by Elias Lönnrot, of 'runo' material he himself collected. It covers several indipendent 'stories' about heroes (eg Lemminki, Kullervo) or events (eg creating of the world, the Sampo sequense) which in the oral tradition were only loosely or not at all connected together (as some of the informants have pointed out). But at the time - the era of Romanticism - an epic with the 'plot' was required, so Lönnrot made one.

All Lönnrot's material and a huge amount by other collectors have been published under the title 'Suomen kansan vanhat runot' (The Old Poems of the Finnish Folk), consisting of 34 (at present) nearly bible thick volumes of transcribed oral tradition.

Mind you, there still are some people living in Finland (and Russian Karelia) who have learned a lot of traditional poetry from the singing of their (grand)parents at the beginning of 20th century.

AKS
Suomen suurilta saloilta, Kalevalan kankahilta
(~ from the vast woodlands of Finland, Kalevala's pine barrens)