Jyväskylä Arts Festival (Finnish: Jyväskylän Kesä) is an arts festival celebrated annually at Jyväskylä, Finland since 1956. It has since become one of the biggest arts festivals in Finland. Close to 40 000 people took part in the event in 2009.

Jyväskylä (Finnish pronunciation: [ˈjyvæsˌkylæ]) is a city and municipality in Central Finland in the western part of the Finnish Lakeland. It is the largest city in central Finland and on the Finnish Lakeland. Jyväskylä is located on the northern coast of Lake Päijänne, 147 kilometres (91 mi) north-east of Tampere and 270 kilometres (170 mi) north of Helsinki. The hilly and forested terrain in Jyväskylä is surrounded by hundreds of lakes. The summers in Jyväskylä are warm and winters cold and snowy.

Elias Lönnrot, the compiler of the Finnish national epic Kalevala, gave the city a nickname "Athens of Finland". This nickname is used to describe the major role of Jyväskylä as an education centre and the first place in the world to provide education in Finnish.

The works of the most famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto can be seen throughout the city. The city hosts Neste Oil Rally Finland, which is part of the World Rally Championship. It is also home of the annual Jyväskylä Arts Festival.

An arts festival is a festival that focuses on the visual arts in all its forms, but which may also focus on or include other arts.

Arts festivals in the visual arts are exhibitions and are not to be confused with the commercial art fair. Artists participate in the most important of such festival exhibitions by invitation, and these exhibitions (e.g. the Venice Biennale) are organised by internationally recognized curators chosen by a committee of peers. These international exhibitions must be distinguished from art fairs, market-oriented gatherings of art dealers and their wares, which have recently emerged as among the most important art-world venues for promoting artists and sales of contemporary art in the present-day super-heated art market.

Probably the two oldest festivals are in England. The Three Choirs Festival in the West of England was established as a "yearly musical assembly" by 1719. The other is the Norfolk and Norwich Festival which first took place in 1772. The largest arts festival in England today is the Brighton Festival Fringe.

Sonata Arctica is a Finnish power metal band from the town of Kemi, originally assembled in 1995. Their later works (most notably The Days of Grays, Unia and a few tracks on Reckoning Night and Winterheart's Guild) contain several elements typical of progressive metal.

The band was founded by Marko Paasikoski, Jani Liimatainen and Tommy Portimo in Kemi at the end of 1995 (Tony Kakko and Pentti Peura joined in early 1996). Originally named Tricky Beans, they played hard rock rather than the power metal with which they grew to fame. During their early career, they recorded three demos which were never sent to any recording label — Friend 'till the End, Agre Pamppers and PeaceMaker.

In 1997 the band changed their name to Tricky Means, and from that point until 1999 their style was thoroughly worked upon and ultimately was drastically changed, acquiring strong emphasis on the keyboard melodies and relying on an easily distinguishable rhythm line maintained both by the bass and the guitar. Vocalist Tony Kakko developed a clean singing style which relies both on falsetto and tenor voices and second guitarist Marko Paasikoski left the band. Kakko has stated that the change of sound was influenced by fellow Finnish power metal band Stratovarius.

In the Sioux way of life, Wakan Tanka (Standard Lakota Orthography: Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka) is the term for "the sacred" or "the divine". This is usually translated as "The Great Spirit". However, according to Russell Means, its meaning is closer to "Great Mystery" as Lakota spirituality is not monotheistic.

Before their attempted conversion to Christianity, the Sioux used Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka to refer to an organization of sacred entities whose ways were mysterious: thus, "The Great Mystery". It is typically understood as the power or the sacredness that resides in everything, similar to many animistic and pantheistic beliefs. This term describes every creature and object as wakȟáŋ ("holy") or having aspects that are wakȟáŋ.

Wakan Tanka was supposed to have placed the stones and minerals in the ground. They were also supposed to change the seasons and weather, and plants were supposed to have come out of the ground by their hand.^{[citation needed]}

Wakan Tanka or Wakan is also known as Wakanda in the Omaha-Ponca, Ioway-Otoe-Missouri, Kansa and Osage languages; and Wakatakeh in Quapaw. In addition, there is Ho-Chunk Mahanah, Mandan Omahank, and Tutelo Mahomny.