Seat of Our Pants

It may not look the part, but this little Russian Orthodox church is actually a thumb-in-the-eye addressed to Sweden ,courtesy of Imperial Russia. To understand what I’m talking about, a history lesson is in order.

 
The border where the church stands is now in the middle of a shopping center, but up to 1809 this place was a part of Sweden. Indeed, all of Finland was a Swedish county. Its neighbor on the eastern side was Russia, then ruled by the Tsars. Swedes often like to remind the Finns about the fact that Finland was Swedish, but the sad fact is that in the end, the Finns were quite happy to let the Russians have a go at ruling their homeland – the Swedes were just that bad. In 1809, the hopeless King Gustav IV of Sweden lost the province to Russia, and the two have never been together again.

 
Having lost Tornio, the main regional center, Sweden had to build a new border town: Haparanda. One can imagine that a little cold war must have broken out for a while, but neighbors will be neighbors and soon everyone settled down to do a bit of the old-fashioned border trading (and smuggling, lots of smuggling). Not everything was peachy though: to spite the protestant Swedes, the Russians built this orthodox church in full view of the Swedish border.

Today, the two towns of Tornio and Haparanda are an example for the rest of Europe: two almost fully integrated communities that straddle an international border. The twin towns have a lot of common services, and almost nothing separate the two. It’s almost like it was 1808 again.

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