Work in progress Work in progress — this site is being built during September 2026. Facts are being checked page by page; if something looks wrong, it probably is. Write to martin@kalli-family.de.
Kalli Family

Our story

This is the long version of "Kalli's way north" — written by Martin, checked against the family papers, and still being corrected. Where the record is uncertain, it says so.

A Sauerland birth, a Cologne childhood

Martin was born on 6 January 1965 in Olsberg in the Sauerland, while the family lived in Brilon. He never grew up there: within his first year his parents, Friedhelm and Elfriede Kallenbach, had moved to Köln-Porz on the Rhine, and that is where the first ten years happened — primary school at the Peter-Petersen-Grundschule from 1972, the river, the city.

In 1976 the family moved out to Rösrath, east of Cologne, and in 1978 into the house in Rösrath-Forsbach that would stay the family home for more than forty years. Friedhelm had founded Kallenbach-Elektronik in 1972 and ran it from that house until weeks before he died. Martin went to the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Gymnasium in Rösrath and passed his Abitur in 1984.

The family is not from the Rhineland, though. The Kallenbachs come from Dortmund-Hörde and the farming country of the Kreis Soest and Unna in Westphalia; both of Martin’s parents were born in Dortmund. Rösrath is where their life happened, not where the line begins — that story is in the family archive.

Three siblings

Martin has two sisters. Ute, three years older, still lives on the family property in Rösrath-Forsbach. Julya came into the household as a child; she is a sister in every sense that counts. The two lost touch for about twenty-five years, until Martin found her again online in 2017. She lives in Gütersloh — which is why that town keeps turning up in this family’s story.

Both parents have died: Friedhelm in January 2010, Elfriede in January 2021.

Faith, service, and the door into IT

Confirmation in 1978 was, by his own account, the point at which Martin’s faith became his own; as a teenager he went out with Operation Mobilisation in 1982–83, and the family kept supporting mission work for decades afterwards. After the Abitur came civilian service with the Protestant parish in Köln-Dellbrück, working mostly with elderly people, and then — from 1986 — training as a Mathematisch-technischer Assistent at Colonia Versicherung in Cologne. That was the door into IT, and it never closed: AXA Tech in Cologne for twelve years, then Nokia, HCL, Tieto and Cognizant in Finland, and since October 2025 his own consultancy, BilboConsult.

27 June 1984 — Cologne

In the summer of 1984 the Protestant parish of Forsbach-Rösrath hosted a youth group from its Finnish partner congregation in Kulosaari, Helsinki. On the programme’s Cologne sightseeing day, 27 June, Martin met a Finnish girl called Eeva-Liisa. Nothing came of it then. Nineteen years passed without a word.

2003 — Karlsruhe

In September 2003 Liisa, by now a student at EVTEK in Espoo, joined a class trip to Germany and wrote to Martin’s old address before she left. The reply came on 25 September. On 29 September they spent a day walking around Karlsruhe — and from that day on they wrote to each other almost daily. (They counted.) The address he wrote from was mrkalli@kalli-family.de — this domain has been in the family since 2003.

Martin’s first marriage ended in those years; three children, Tim, Lukas and Christiane, were born in Germany and are very much part of this family. That chapter is told, if at all, by the people who lived it — not on a website.

2006–2008 — the crossing

In July 2006 Liisa moved to Bergisch Gladbach with four of her children, so that the two families could become one household. Martin and Liisa married in Germany on 31 July 2007 and celebrated their church wedding in Virrat, in the Finnish lake district, on 29 June 2008 — by which time the decision to move north had already been made. Martin had a job offer from Nokia. The blog, “Kalli’s way north”, started in May 2008 with a post called The story of Lissu & Kalli, and the family moved to Finland in August 2008. The Christmas letter that year, signed “Lissu & Kalli”, said it plainly: we have arrived well in Finland — a little sad about what we left behind, very grateful for the time we had.

Finland

Nokia in Espoo; later HCL, Tieto and Cognizant. A house in Klaukkala in 2009, a home in Helsinki since 2017. Ten children between them — Martin’s three, Liisa’s seven — now grown, with partners and children of their own, in Finland, Germany and Switzerland. Church at UCC in Espoo, where Martin runs the sound desk. Sixty years were celebrated in May 2025 at a manor house in Hauho, with family flying in from Germany and colleagues from every employer since AXA — which says more about Martin than his CV does.

In October 2025 Martin left corporate life and founded BilboConsult. Eighteen years after the move, Finland is not the place they went to; it is the place they live. And the Finnish — after all those years — is finally, slowly, being learned properly.