Qualla: Huittinen

Huittinen: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A farm worker turned it up in a potato field at Palojoki in 1903: a piece of soapstone nearly fifteen centimetres long, carved into the head of an elk. He can have had little sense of what he was holding. The carving is between eight and nine thousand years old — the oldest stone sculpture ever found in Finland, and by most reckonings the country's best-known archaeological object. It changed hands at a market in Turku the following year. Today it sits in the National Museum in Helsinki, and Huittinen, a low, unhurried farming town in Satakunta, keeps a replica.

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Huittinen: Ten Centimetres of Soapstone

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Soapstone does not occur in western Finland. Whoever made the elk either carried the raw block across the country or traded for it, which means that eight thousand years ago the people living along the Kokemäenjoki were tied into networks reaching far to the east. The head is dri...

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Huittinen: The President Who Signed in His Own Name

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Risto Ryti was born in Huittinen on 3 February 1889. He governed the Bank of Finland from 1923 to 1939 and became prime minister on 1 December 1939, the day after Soviet bombs opened the Winter War. On 19 December 1940 he became president. His presidency turned on a letter. In 1...

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Huittinen: Kaija Above the Fields

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The parish appears in written record in 1414, and the grey stone church of St Catherine of Alexandria — known locally by the affectionate shortenings Kaija and Kaisa — went up around 1500, a single-nave hall of about 14 by 28 metres under star vaulting. Fire took it on 23 May 178...

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Huittinen: Ferry Village

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Huittinen's centre is called Lauttakylä — ferry village — and the name is a plain description of how it came to exist. The old Helsinki–Pori road crossed the Turku–Tampere road here, at the point where travellers had to be ferried over the Loimijoki. Junctions attract traffic; tr...

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Huittinen: Granodiorite and Gold

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Huittinen is flat in a way that takes some getting used to. The lowest ground follows the rivers through the centre of town, and the bedrock — mostly granodiorite — is nowhere exposed within the city area, buried everywhere under clay and till. An esker runs through from the Koke...

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