Qualla: Nummi Church

Nummi Church: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abc10, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the summer of 2008 lightning found the bell tower of Nummi Church and set several small fires smouldering inside the woodwork. The grey stone underneath was a hundred and eighty-six years old and entirely unbothered; it was the tower's wooden cupola that suffered, and its outer shell had to be replaced. Stone has a way of outlasting whatever is fastened to it. This church has been outlasting things since 1822 — an earlier wooden building, one empire's rule and then another's, three separate cemeteries filled in succession — and the oldest object inside it was carved roughly four and a half centuries before the walls existed.

Read more: Nummi Church on Qualla

Image: Abc10 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nummi Church: Designed Under One Empire, Finished Under Another

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Miraceti, CC BY-SA 3.0. The drawings were made in Stockholm in 1807, at the Royal Intendent's Office, by Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz. Finland was Swedish territory when he drew them. By the time the grey stone church stood complete in 1822, Finland had spent thirteen years as a Grand Duchy of the Russian ...

Read more: Nummi Church on Qualla

Image: Miraceti | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nummi Church: What Was Carried Over

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hotarju, CC BY-SA 3.0. Nummi already had a church — a wooden one from the seventeenth century, standing at what is now the old graveyard. Almost nothing of it survives; a sacristy of grey stone is the only piece left standing. But two things made the journey into the new building. The pulpit came from ...

Read more: Nummi Church on Qualla

Image: Hotarju | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nummi Church: Paint, Pipes and Wool

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abc10, CC BY-SA 3.0. The altarpiece was painted in Stockholm in 1825 by Axel Johan Jägerplan and comes in two panels: Jesus at the Last Supper in one, the Crucifixion in the other. The organ story is stranger. The facade built in 1864 by Gustaf Normann's organ factory in Tallinn still stands at the b...

Read more: Nummi Church on Qualla

Image: Abc10 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nummi Church: Three Grounds for the Dead

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Htm, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nummi buries in three places. The oldest cemetery dates from the 1600s and holds the footprint of the vanished wooden church. A second was laid out in the 1820s alongside the new building, and the newest was consecrated on 4 October 2009. Among the graves stands Emil Filén's memo...

Read more: Nummi Church on Qualla

Image: Htm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nummi Church: Two Hundred Years In

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abc10, CC BY-SA 3.0. The municipality of Nummi no longer exists as such; Nummi-Pusula was folded into the city of Lohja in 2013, and the church now belongs to the Lohja parish within the Diocese of Espoo. In August 2022 the parish marked the building's two hundredth anniversary with a festival mass. ...

Read more: Nummi Church on Qualla

Image: Abc10 | CC BY-SA 3.0