Kansan Lehti 23 Dec. 1927. Heikki Laakso’s reflections on the sixtieth anniversary of the Great Hunger Years were illustrated with the spectre of Death.
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To bookend my research into Finland’s Great Hunger Years, I’ve written a book on the subject (it was apparently published earlier this week, at least in e-Book form, with the actual “proper book” following in a week or two). It was a challenge to squeeze in all of the material I’d gathered into 100,000 words, and in the end I followed the themes that I’d covered in the Nälkä! exhibition, because these themes seemed to be the ones that non-Finnish audiences found most interesting, and reflected the most common questions that I’d been asked about the famine. Full details of the book are on the Springer / Palgrave website and some of it is apparently on Google Books.
I’ve written the book in order to provide some basic information for others to build comparative or transnational historical famine studies upon, and I’ve tried to use the space as wisely as possible by not repeating material by colleagues that is already available in English. I had originally planned to write a book only on famine charity – that is still my plan for the future but I’ll do it on a nineteenth-century European basis. A colleague however told me that I really should do something broader and more wide-ranging, to leave something behind for others to use as a basis for their studies into the Finnish famine. So that’s what I’ve tried to do, and I’ll be glad if future works build on or even debunk my thoughts on the subject. There is, of course, an intro chapter which tried to set the scene (and which outlines the so-called “home rule” administration that ruled Finland’s internal affairs from 1809-1917 – this is the single biggest discussion point when it comes to comparing this disaster with the Irish famine of the 1840s). My research on famine memorials, and the fieldwork and local studies that have accompanied it, feature in the text but there is no separate chapter – partly because there is already this website, and partly because I’ve already written two or three articles on the subject.
For the cover of the book, I chose a relatively well-known Finnish painting, Kuoleman vaellus [Death’s Walk], by the renowned symbolist Magnus Enckell. The painting dates from 1896, and I was glad to see the work “in real life” in a major exhibition of Enckell’s work, held at the Ateneum in Helsinki in late 2020. I think, although it was only painted 28 years after the end of the famine, this work brings to mind the slow creep of death through the frozen Finnish countryside. Coincidentally, Lari Rantanen and Tuomas Jussila also chose an Enckell work to illustrate the cover of their excellent 2020 collection, Nälkävuodet 1867-1868 (SKS). I had wanted the Kuoleman vaellus image for along time, and was delighted that it was one of the images for which Palgrave had a license. I chose the particular shade of blue to evoke the colours which (much later) were included in the flag of Finland.
The dates of the book, as I explain in the introduction, are not necessarily because there was an incessant famine from 1856 to 1868, but rather because there were three crises (1856-7, 1862-3, 1866-8) which all contributed to the disaster of 1867-8. Many of the themes of the book – emergency food, charity, relief works etc. can only be explained by looking into the responses to these other harvest failures. As explained in my previous post, I have already come across a typo or two, and I might use this website to highlight anything important that comes to my attention.
The long production process of my new book on Finland’s 1860s Great Hunger Years is now complete, and there is nothing to do other than wait for the publication in a couple of weeks (May / June 2023). Incidentally, the manuscript was submitted in February 2022, so that gives an indication of the “production” phase of things can last, even without any apparent glitches. As I mention in the introduction, I never had any great wish to try and write a monograph on this subject, and it’s not possible to include everything in one volume, but the book will essentially follow the themes that I explored during the Nälkä! museum exhibition (2017-19). That is, governance, emergency food, charity, relief works, migration & crime, emigration outside of Finland, etc. Ideas of memory and memorialisation run through the book, but there is no separate chapter as space was limited and I’ve written about that elsewhere. Anyway, this will mark the end of my work on the famine, other than one more article that I have promised to write for a more general book on famines in Europe.
In the manner of a neurotic author, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks since finalising the proofs of the book sporadically looking back over those proofs and trying to find things that I have missed – even though the printing presses (or whatever) are already running and it’s too late to do anything about it. I feel that, as a foreigner writing about Finland, even the slightest typo will undermine any supposed expertise that I possess. (I remember spelling Piippola as Piipola in one earlier article, even though I knew perfectly well how to spell Piippola. It was, in the modern parlance, a brain-fart).
The fact is, the way that modern publishing works, typos are almost inevitable. There is not enough time given to focus on amending texts, there is no money available to pay professional proofs readers. And if you happen to work in a university and are given a week to look over proofs at a time when there are also lectures to be delivered, essays to be marked, doctoral students to be advised, curricula to be revised… well, First World Problems for sure but it is a stress and an annoyance.
So I have found one or two sentences in the final version of the book which have a word missing, or a tense wrong – usually because the sentence got amended at some point and there’s been a copy / paste issue. No matter how many times you go through a 100,000 word document, the brain can miss things, especially as sentences go over pages or where words look like other words. To take an example from one of my previous books, it’s relatively easy to see when you have typed “pulbic” rather than “public”, but sadly “pubic” can get through. I don’t even remember academic books when I was a student having typos – I guess they did. I suspect professors passed books to their secretaries and they typed them up (at least, that’s how it was when I was first started, older colleagues didn’t yet believe that computers were here to stay). Maybe I just didn’t care about small typos, and maybe people still don’t care, it just feels worse when you’ve worked on something for years and these things crop up. I do remember books had little slips of paper containing “errata”, but they seem to have gone too.
All this self-flagellation leads me to my main concern (at the moment) about the new book. A decision had to be made about how to present placenames – some of which have changed considerably since the 1860s (for example, how would a non-Finnish reader be expected to know that Nikolainkaupunki was the same place as Wasa, Waasa, Vasa or Vaasa?) What about Viipuri / Vyborg, which for sad historical reasons might also need to be rendered as Вы́борг… And in general, would I use the Swedish form, which was more common in the 1860s, but which might mean that readers couldn’t always easily identify the location today? An an Irishman, this placename issue is very important to me anyway (so please do read Brian Friel’s Translations, if you’ve not done so already).
So I decided that, other than in direct translations, I would use the form of the placename that is in use in 2023, be it Finnish or Swedish (but exceptionally kept Viipuri as Viipuri). So Åbo in the 1860s will be Turku in my book. Jakobstad, which remains a majority Swedish-speaking town in 2023, would be presented as Jakobstad rather than Pietarsaari. To give more context for this decision, the book has a table at the beginning, with some common placenames, the Finnish, Swedish forms and any other notes, as an asterisk denoting which form I’m using in the book. I took a lot of care, for fearing of offending anyone, to make sure I’d got my stats right about which places were Swedish-speaking majorities in 2022-3, and which were Finnish.
And now, just as the book is about to be published, is see that the Finnish and Swedish forms for the village of Lappfjärd / Lapväärtti are in the wrong columns. Once you’ve noticed it, you can’t un-notice it… it sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. I’ve been there, I know the place, I know which form is which, and yet despite dozens of checks this mistake remains, and will be there forever, in print. Publish and be damned, indeed (much as I don’t like to quote British aristocrats).
I know I’d be annoyed if someone had transposed, for example, Béal an Átha and Ballina in a similar table relating to the Great Irish Famine – although I suppose I don’t think I’d really believe that the author didn’t know what they were doing. I can only put it down to experience and take my beatings from the book reviewers.
My first new entry for a long time, as I discovered a reference to a possibly lost memorial in Isokyrö while looking for other material in 1930s newspapers. In October 1936, the Seinäjoki-based Ilkka newspaper ran a short article as follows:
NEXT TO KYRÖNVIRTA: “A road made with crown funds during the reign of Alexander II. At that time, famine and death prevailed in the land. 1868.” The inscription above is carved in a stone along the road that leads from Untamala through Lehmäjoki to Isonkyrö Church, and is located about a kilometre from Lehmäjoki Cooperative in the direction of Untamala. Because the road is connected with the memory of the Great Hunger Years, we want to describe a bit about those times a full generation in the past.
The article’s author, “Sakari” then proceeded to give a description of local conditions within the overall national historical framework.
I have not had a chance to visit this area since reading about the old memorial, which sounds very similar to the well-known and well-maintained stone at Taivalmaa, on Tokerotie. Even if this stone at Lehmajoki has been removed because of road improvements, or otherwise lost, the reference at least hints at a pattern of contemporary memorials in Ostrobothnia which highlighted the benevolent actions of the imperial authorities in providing work for the unemployed and starving.
Hopefully I can get a chance to investigate this intriguing lead more in the summer of 2022.
The most westerly (marginally west of Vaasa) of the 1860s famine memorials that I’m aware of, the contemporary stone in Merikarvia has eluded me so far – but I hope to return a.s.a.p. for another look! The stone is north from the town centre along Rantatie, and is pictured in e.g. Pertti Kohvakka’s collection of memories from 2015 (see below). It is reminiscent of several of the other contemporary memorials, which just have the year roughly hewn into the rock (along with the enigmatic initials, “IK”). It was apparently relates to the relief work that was provided in 1868. Almost a century later, when the road was being improved in the 1960s, the stone nearly got removed – but in the end it was put in its current position. I spent a couple of hours walking up and down the road without actually spotting the stone – I know it is about a kilometre north of the “Ruohon kauppa” and was in the right vicinity, but it was just one of those days when all the rocks looks the same… In 2012, there was talk of adding a plaque – maybe to create something like the Tokerotie memorial – but as far as I know, this was not carried forward. The “1868 IK” text has earlier been coloured red – but this has not been maintained (maybe following the current accepted practice e.g. of rock carvings, where this highlighting is not encouraged).
Update: In the summer of 2022, Kristiina Dyer revisited the question of this memorial in the local newspaper, and the stone was indeed quickly relocated. See these two articles from Merikarvia Lehti1st August and 2nd August (paywall).
Sources:
Merikarvia-Lehti, 7 Sep. 1983.
Kristiina Dyer, “Kivipaasi kaipaa kylttiä”, Merikarvia-lehti, 2012.
Kristiina Dyer, “Minne ihmeeseen se kivi oikein katosi?”, Merikarvia-lehti, 1 Aug. 2022.
Kristiina Dyer, “Löytyihän se kivi – Nälkävuodet eivät unohdu Merikarvialla”, Merikarvia-lehti, 2 Aug. 2022.
Near Padasjoki, about 30km south of the Kuhmoinen “Hunger Stone”, is a another anonymous memorial from the 1860s. This one was left as a reminder of the road that was built as relief work, between Padasjoki and Nyystölä, after 1866. I became aware of this stone after seeing a brief exchange of letters in the local newspaper, from the summer of 2013. In the original article, Leo Suomaa gave an account of local memorials and claimed that a small plaque at Tarusjärvi – marking a Häme Jaeger camp from 1963 – was probably Padasjoki’s “most unknown” memorial. The discussion was joined the next week by Helka Luoto, who wrote that:
…the most unknown monument is probably that carved into a rock alongside the road made during the Great Hunger Years (1866-68), nowadays Nyystöläntie, the location of which was once shown to this author by Leo’s grandmother’s father, who also told stories about the years of famine that survived in his family, although he had not experienced them himself at the time. Compared to the “sweatstone” of Tarusjärvi, one can only imagine what it was like to build a road in Padasjoki’s rocky terrain, with contemporary manual tools and weakened by hunger.
In the next edition of the newspaper, a photo of the memorial (by Antti Kortelahti) was published – I hope to find time to visit and look for it myself some time soon.
Like its Southern Ostrobothnian “neighbour” at Lapinkaivo (over 100km walk by the most direct route…), the memorial at Lakaluoma, about 20km east of Lapua, represents a tragic individual story that we can only presume was replicated around Finland in 1867-68.
In an earlier edition (1988) of Lapuan Sanomat, it was explained that the white cross had the text “1868” and a small plaque saying “Maria Lapinsaari on tähän vaipunu” [“Maria Lapinsaari has fallen here”]. My friend and colleague Dr. Eliza Kraatari, currently based in Seinäjoki, went to investigate and sent me these haunting photos, which I reproduce below with her permission.
I found an even earlier article – coincidentally from just over a century ago – which demonstrates the long heritage of this memorial, whether or not the current cross is the original (the plaque certainly seems to be new). In Vaasa (20 Aug. 1920), we can read the following short article:
Vaasa 19 Aug. 1920.
Interestingly, the article explains that mention of the year “1868” brings contrasting emotions to Finns’ minds: of course, there was the terrible famine year, but on the other hand, there was also the terrific harvest of that summer, which finally brought to an end the long series of harvest failures and heralded better times. It concludes: ‘one of the “memorial statues” of those times is still to be found along the narrow village road that meanders through the forest from Lapua’s Lakaluoma to the village of Kotajärvi in the same parish. “Here Maria Lapinsaari fell in 1868”. – This sentence does not need further explanation.’
Dr. Eliza Kraatari‘s photos (10 Oct. 2020) are added below. Please do not reproduce these without Dr. Kraatari’s explicit permission:
Sources:
Vaasa 19 Aug. 1920 (also e.g. Karjalan Maa, 26 Aug. 1920).
As the winter of 2020-21 starts to approach, it seems less likely that I’m going to have time to return to come of the memorial sites for which I have firm secondary evidence, but where I wasn’t able to find anything on first visit. As a result, starting with Anttola, I’m going to write “holding” entries with some of the evidence I have found, until such time as I can re-visit in person.
In April 1971, a “memorial for those who died from hunger” was announced in Länsi-Savo newspaper, coinciding with the hundredth anniversary of Anttola parish. The project was being driven forward by bank manager Pentti Seppänen, and was to mark the old famine-era graveryard “near the municipal offices”. It was not known how many victims were lying in the mass grave, and there was apparently only one named gravestone in the vicinity – that of the church’s first cantor, Wilhelm Kyyrö (d. 1891). The memorial was to be of natural stone, with a copper plaque, a similar style to many of the contemporary famine memorials (and indeed memorials for other events).
Länsi-Savo, 2 Apr. 1971.
By the time autumn came around, and Anttola was ready to celebrate its centenary as an independent parish on Sunday 12th August 1971, the memorial unveiling was for the “old graveyard”, rather than for those who starved during the famine. (Länsi-Savo, 17 Aug., 11 Sep., 13 Sep. 1971). I am not sure at this point whether there was some change of plan (which seemed fairly concrete in April), whether some “rebranding” went on, or whether maybe there are two different memorial. This is on my “to-do” list.
Länsi-Savo, 3 Apr. 1971.
In Summer 2019, I visited Anttola and spent some time in the old graveyard. Despite some cleaning up and renewal in 2010 (see e.g. Länsi-Savo, 15 Jun. 2010), it was quite overgrown again by 2019. According to Leena Lahdenvesi-Kohonen (2010), the old graveyard and its renovation was on the local agenda – and indeed a useful map in Lahdenvesi-Korhonen’s report allowed me to pinpoint the old graveyard.
Anttola Old Graveyard, July 2019.
The dilemma is therefore this: (i) I was able to locate the old graveyard (Pajakuja 2, essentially), and there were indeed several stones in various states of disrepair, but the generally overgrown state made it hard to find what was called the “Old Graveyard Memorial” at the 1971 unveiling ceremony; (ii) this seems not to be the site that was intended for the “victims of hunger” memorial, which was described as a mass grave with only one named stone.
So, a return visit to Anttola is needed to get to the bottom of all this!
A short entry for another “contemporary”-looking 1860s famine memorial, which my friend Dr. Eliza Kraatari found while exploring the churchyard in Vimpeli, Southern Ostrobothnia. Like examples at (relatively) nearby Perho, and other places in Finland (e.g. Kuhmoinen and Liperi), the stone is roughly-hewn with a date, apparently 1867. I will visit Vimpeli as soon as possible to look at the stone in person and take some more photos. Please do not re-use these photos without asking Eliza Kraatari for permission.
Kannus (known in the 1860s as Ylikannus) is one of the sites that I always believed seemed likely to have a famine memorial. Having passed by the parish church on trips through Central Ostrobothnia (Kannus is a very short drive from many of the other places mentioned on this blog, such as Lohtaja, Kälviä, Toholampi, Ullava, and Sievi) I had stopped on several occasions to look in the graveyard for signs of a memorial stone.
Kannus Church dates from 1817 (the previous church on the site, from 1761, burned down and its location is marked by a memorial in the churchyard). My mistake, however, was in presuming that a famine memorial would be located in the immediate vicinity of the church. In fact, it turned out that Kannus does have an 1860s memorial, but it is situated in the nearby graveyard of St. Michael’s Chapel – a 5-10 minute walk from the main church. The graveyard was established in 1863 and I presume that it was used as a mass grave during the famine years. Turpeinen (1986) notes that Kannus, along with the neighbouring parishes in Central Ostrobothnia, was already suffering from a severe typhus epidemic in 1865, and was extremely vulnerable in 1867-8.
Births and deaths for Kannus parish, 1868. The extent of the crisis can be seen in the fact that the parish witnessed only 72 births compared with 398 deaths in the worst famine year. National Archives of Finland, Kannus (Ylikannus) Parish Archives, Population Tables (1868).
Interestingly, although the parish website highlights several other memorials in the graveyard, the famine memorial is not mentioned (July 2019).
I was able to revisit Kannus in July 2019, and finally got to take some photos of the memorial, which is fairly familiar in form: a simple stone with plaque indicating the dates of the famine, and a biblical quotation. As I find out more about the inauguration date and so on, I’ll update this page.
Modern Region: Central Ostrobothnia (Keski-Pohjanmaa).
Year of Memorial: TBC.
Inscription: “In memory of the dead residents of of Kannus from the Great Famine Years of 1867-1868. [placed on behalf of ] Ancestors. 1 Moses 47:13″.*
*1 Moses (Genesis) 47:13 reads: “There was no food, however, in the whole region because the famine was severe; both Egypt and Canaan wasted away because of the famine.”
References:
Oiva Turpeinen, Nälkä vai tauti tappoi? Kauhunvuodet 1866-68 (Helsinki, 1986), pp. 50-1.
The memorial to “Victims of the Years of Dearth” in Kontiolahti is an early work by the renowned glass designer and artist, Päivi Kekäläinen. I am very grateful to Päivi for giving me some information about the memorial, and extracts from Kontiolahti – Kirkon Kylä, and I visited the site at the old graveyard in person in July 2019.
The people of Kontiolahti have suffered many tribulations. In 1791 there was a harvest failure year, wars in 1808-09, and terrible years of dearth struck again in 1833 and 1868. The latter year of dearth was the worst of all – a seventh of the whole country’s population was lost. In Kontiolahti the death figures were three times greater than in previous years, and there were 736 victims.
Kontiolahti – kirkon kylä, p. 294.
The local parish and municipality raised some money for a memorial and the memorial itself was then designed by the Kontiolahti native and (at the time) Art & Design student, Päivi Kekäläinen. The memorial was inaugurated in the old graveyard on the 20th July, 1989. It is quite easily visible from the main entrance to the graveyard.
Finland's "Great Hunger Years" Memorials 