Qualla: Koijärvi

Koijärvi: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kotivalo, CC BY-SA 4.0. The excavator came for the dam in April 1979, and the young people chained themselves to it. Koijärvi is a shallow lake in the flat farm country north of Forssa — reeds, open shallows, the smell of warm mud in June — the kind of water a driver passes without turning his head. By the 1970s it was also the most important bird lake in southwest Häme, and the landowners around it had begun draining it while the water court case was still pending. What followed turned a local dispute over ditches into the founding story of Finnish environmental politics.

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Image: Kotivalo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Koijärvi: Forty-Six Years on the Map

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kallerna, CC BY-SA 4.0. Koijärvi was a municipality for less than half a century. It was carved out of Tammela and Urjala in 1923 — the same year Forssa was separated from Tammela — and it covered 174.5 square kilometres of field, forest and bog. At the end of 1968 it had 2,262 inhabitants. A year later...

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Image: kallerna | CC BY-SA 4.0

Koijärvi: At Kojo

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kotivalo, CC BY-SA 4.0. The main village, Kojo, is older than the municipality by centuries. It surfaces in the records in 1600 as Quoiuull, a scribe's attempt at the Finnish adessive — "at Kojo" — which modern orthography writes Kojolla and which Tavastian dialect speakers clip to Kojol. Names here wea...

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Image: Kotivalo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Koijärvi: Three Months in Exile

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Foge, CC0. In 1906 Kojo manor took in an unlikely guest. Maxim Gorky — by then Russia's most famous living writer and a man who had to leave the empire for political reasons — spent three months here, in a house surrounded by rye fields and spruce. Finland was still a Grand Duchy under the ...

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Image: Foge | CC0

Koijärvi: Chains, Camps and Court Dates

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit saruwine from Tampere, Finland, CC BY-SA 2.0. In April 1979 landowners around the lake started drainage work without authorisation, the water court case still unresolved. On 21 April, conservationists built a dam to hold the level up. When machines arrived to tear it out, protesters chained themselves to them. Police hauled ...

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Image: saruwine from Tampere, Finland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Koijärvi: The Water Now

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Koijärvi church Forssa Finland.jpg: Kotivalo derivative work: Htm, CC BY-SA 4.0. Koijärvi has been protected since 1992 and sits inside a Natura 2000 site of roughly 242 hectares, which is not quite the same thing as being saved. Shallow lakes silt and grow in; reed and sedge advance a little further each year. Black-headed gulls and coots have disappeared fr...

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Image: Koijärvi church Forssa Finland.jpg: Kotivalo derivative work: Htm | CC BY-SA 4.0