Local history

Nowadays Helsinki is known as the capital city of Finland, but originally Helsinki was not a city.  Helsinki was a rural parish founded in the fourteenth century, comprising what are now the municipalities of Helsinki and Vantaa and parts of Nurmijärvi and Tuusula – except that much of present-day Helsinki was under water.  (Ground level has risen about two meters here since the Middle Ages.)

The name Helsinki comes from Helsingland, a region in Sweden.  People from Sweden moved to Finland's southern and western coasts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Before that time, much of Finland's southern coast had been without permanent inhabitants for hundreds of years.  People had lived here before, but for some reason population had dwindled, and during the Viking era it had also been dangerous to live near the Gulf of Finland.  Finnish-speaking people who lived farther inland in Häme came to the coastal areas to hunt and trade.

Traders sailed from other countries to get animal skins and furs from Finland.  Finnish hunters and trappers could trade with them, so that the original meaning of raha, the Finnish word meaning money, is a squirrel skin.  A stack of ten squirrel skins was a tikkuri, hence the name Tikkurila for the place where traders coming from the sea met hunters who came along the Kerava River to exchange goods.  (Tikkurila is now the center for public administration and railroad traffic in the city of Vantaa.)  Westward along the coast, the sea reached what is now the southwestern corner of Vantaa.  The name Hämeenkylä comes from people from Häme who met traders there.  Estonians were also interested in fishing and hunting along Finland's southern coast.

The new settlers from Sweden were already Catholic Christians when they came.  A congregation was founded in Helsinki around the year 1350, and a church, probably a wooden one, was built soon afterwards.  The earliest historical record of a church in the Helsinki rural parish is from 1401, when Anders Rekola donated a large farm to the parish church.  According to Roman Catholic teaching, after death most Christians end up in purgatory, a painful fire that cleanses the soul from sinfulness so that it becomes fit for heaven.  In the Middle Ages it was a common practice to make donations and payments to the church with the hope that this would shorten the time spent in purgatory.  Anders Rekola made his donation on the condition that Masses would be said on behalf of his soul and the souls of his wife and descendants regularly until the end of the world.  That was really done for more than a hundred years,  but then the Protestant Reformation did away with such practices.  This Rekola farm, however, remained church property until the twentieth century when the suburb of Rekola was built.  The Rekola parish church of St. Andrew, built in the 1980's, reminds of the name of Anders Rekola.

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, peasant sailors from the villages of rural Helsinki traded with Tallinn, then the most important commercial port on the Gulf of Finland.  This trade boosted the economy in Helsinki.

A stone church to replace the old building was constructed in the latter half of the fifteenth century, perhaps in 1460. This Helsinki rural parish church of St. Lawrence is still standing. A great fire in 1893 destroyed the ceiling and all wooden parts of the church, so that only the stone walls and vaults remained.  The church was rebuilt in a way that somewhat changed its medieval style.  You can read about this church in English on the web page The Church of St. Lawrence .

The church and the village where it stood were the center of Helsinki.  The main road (”King's highway”) from Turku to Viipuri crossed the Vantaa River at Vantaankoski, came through Ylästö and passed right by the church.  In 1550 the city of Helsinki was founded by the sea, but the city remained small until the nineteenth century.  From 1652 to 1851 Lutherans in the city and rural parish were one congregation.   Most people in the Helsinki area lived on farms, and near the sea fishing was also important.  Swedish was the predominant language.  Most of the Finnish-speaking villages in the northwestern part of the parish became a part of the Nurmijärvi parish in the mid-1500's.

Sawmills and mining and the construction of the Sveaborg fortress (present-day Suomenlinna) developed the economy in the eighteenth century, but it was in the nineteenth century that life in rural Helsinki really began to change.  The city of Helsinki became the capital of Finland in 1812 and began to grow.  Starting in the 1860's, railroads began to attract people to places like Malmi and Tikkurila.  Little by little southern parts of the Helsinki parish were annexed into the city, for example Malmi in 1946 and finally Vuosaari in 1966.  Urbanization also spilled over into what was left of the rural parish.  People moving into the Helsinki area from all parts of Finland made the population grow, and this also made Finnish the majority language in the area.  The Lutheran congregation in the Helsinki rural parish was divided into a Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking congregation in 1956, and the Finnish-speaking congregation was divided further into three parishes ten years later.

As new suburbs were built, more and more people were employed for church work, and new church buildings were built.  Until 1930 the Helsinki rural parish had only two pastors; the number was increased to three in 1931 and four in 1938. In 1956 the Finnish and Swedish congregations in the Helsinki rural parish employed a total of five pastors and 24 other employees, but by 1970 the numbers had risen to 16 pastors and 98 other employees.  Between 1957 and 1968 new church buildings rose in Tikkurila, Vaarala, Korso, Hämeenkylä, Kivistö, Kaivoksela and Itä-Hakkila.

Urban growth has changed landscape and lifestyle in the Helsinki area.  The remaining parts of what used to be the Helsinki rural parish became the city of Vantaa in 1974.   Since then the city's population has nearly doubled, as people have continued to move in from other parts of the country – and in recent years also from other countries.  In particular, the commuter railroad built in the late 1960's from Huopalahti to Martinlaakso has attracted a lot of construction and people, and as this railroad is to be continued to Kivistö and then eastward to the airport, more new inhabitants are expected in years to come.

Since the beginning of the year 1985, there have been six Finnish-speaking Lutheran congregations in the city of Vantaa:  Tikkurila, Korso, Rekola and Hakunila on the east side of the airport, and Vantaankoski and Hämeenkylä on the west side.


Literature:

• Haapio, Markku & Luostarinen, Laura (ed.), Suomen kirkot ja kirkkotaide 2, published by Etelä-Suomen Kustannus Oy, 1980.
• Kerkkonen, Gunvor, Helsingin pitäjän keskiaika (part of the book Helsingin pitäjä I, published by the Helsinki rural municipality, 1965).
• Ojanen, Eeva, Helsingin pitäjän seurakunnan historia, Helsinki 1972.
• Vantaa municipal website www.vantaa.fi (see pages Historiaa lyhyesti and Vantaa taskussa -tilastoja, the latter also in English as a PDF brochure ”Vantaa pocket info 2005”).