Tehdyt toimenpiteet
The Historical Heart of a Growing City
Nowadays the Church of St. Lawrence is the principal church of Tikkurila Evangelical-Lutheran Parish and Vantaa Swedish Evangelical-Lutheran Parish.
The old Helsinki Parish Village is part of the rapidly growing City of
Vantaa with its 180,000 inhabitants.
Until the first few decades of the 20th century most of the local
inhabitants were Swedish speakers. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the
Finnish-speaking people, most of whom lived in what are now Tuusula and
Nurmijärvi had a wooden church of their own next to the stone church.
The Finnish-language worship services were transferred to the stone
church in the beginning of the 19th century, and the wooden church was pulled
down. A commemorative sculpture by Heikki Häiväoja stands at the site of the
old wooden church.
In the beginning of the 1950s the parish was divided into two: a
Finnish one and a Swedish one. At the time, Swedish speakers made up one
fifth of Vantaa’s population. At present, Swedish speakers number 6,000 or a
bit over three per cent of the population. A language other than Finnish is
the first language of eight per cent of the city’s residents.
