Qualla: Church of Loimaa Proper

Church of Loimaa Proper: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Htm, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before there was anything here to burn, a woman is supposed to have said the church would burn. Prättäkitti — the name is a nickname, and nobody can now say with certainty who wore it — lived at the Manninen farm in Loimaa, in the part that is today Ypäjä. Legend places her in the 1600s, though some accounts attach the name instead to a nineteenth-century housewife of the same house. She is said to have foretold an iron belt laid across the land and an iron carriage that no horse would pull; the railway reached Loimaa in 1876. She is also said to have foretold that the church would burn. In August 1888, lightning struck the top of the tower.

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Church of Loimaa Proper: The Third Church

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Htm, CC BY-SA 3.0. Loimaa has had a parish since the 1420s, and this is its third church. The first two were wooden and stood nearer Oripää, at the old centre of a parish whose boundaries have been redrawn many times since. The wooden church of 1751 was eventually taken down and moved to Alastaro, ...

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Church of Loimaa Proper: Two Architects, One Set of Drawings

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kotivalo, CC0. The drawings are Charles Bassi's, made in 1824. Born Carlo Francesco Bassi in Turin in 1772 and brought to Sweden as a child, he trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts and became the first professionally trained architect to settle permanently in what is now Finland. From 1...

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Church of Loimaa Proper: What They Carried Out

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Htm, CC BY-SA 3.0. Then August 1888. Lightning hit the top of the tower, the fire caught in the wooden roof structure, and it came down into the body of the church. Whatever people could carry out into the field, they saved — most of the movable furnishings, the altarpiece painting among them. The ...

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Church of Loimaa Proper: The Painting That Stands Free

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Htm, CC BY-SA 3.0. The altarpiece rewards the walk up the aisle. Its central painting is not set into a frame built against the wall; it stands free, and the sacristy sits directly behind it, reachable from either side of the altar. The picture is Kristus ristillä — Christ on the Cross — painted in...

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Church of Loimaa Proper: Prättäkitti Still Gets a Day

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Htm, CC BY-SA 3.0. The pulpit is rarely used now. The carved box stands as furniture with a job it no longer does, and the church itself, together with the parsonage beside it, is protected by the Finnish Heritage Agency. As for Prättäkitti, Loimaa has not let her go: a day in her name falls in lat...

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Image: Htm | CC BY-SA 3.0