Qualla: Pyhämaa

Pyhämaa: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antti Bilund, CC BY-SA 3.0. Two stories explain the name, and the better one is probably false. Pyhämaa means "holy land" in Finnish, and for generations islanders had a satisfying account ready: the place had once been Pahamaa, evil land, a haunt of evil spirits, pirates and criminals, until Isaacus Rothovius, Bishop of Turku, ordered a church raised here in the seventeenth century and the ground was cleansed along with the name. The scholar Veikko Paasio took that account apart. The island was never called Pahamaa, he argued; the word pyhä attached itself to remote places, and Pyhämaa lay a long way from the early settlement centres at Untamala and Kalanti. Pyhämaa could also denote a sacrificial grove. The name first surfaces in a land register of 1540, spelled Pyhema — no demons, no exorcism, just an entry made for the purpose of collecting tax.

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Image: Antti Bilund | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pyhämaa: Land That Keeps Arriving

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anssi Koskinen, CC BY 2.0. Pyhämaa is mostly islands, and several of those islands are no longer islands. The ice sheet that once pressed this coast down melted thousands of years ago, and the bedrock has been rising ever since. Channels shoal. Straits silt up and turn into meadow. Villages that early sett...

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Image: Anssi Koskinen | CC BY 2.0

Pyhämaa: Angels on a Log Wall

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hotarju, CC BY-SA 3.0. From outside, the old church at Pyhämaa reads as a red-boarded barn with a weathervane on the west gable. It was built between 1647 and 1652 — a wooden long-church, rectangular, closed at the altar end on three sides, with no tower whatever — and it counts among the best-preserve...

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Image: Hotarju | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pyhämaa: Demoted, Then Rescued

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EskoG, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1804 the old church had decayed far enough that a new one was built beside it, close enough that the two share a churchyard. The older building was reduced to a storehouse. Over the following century it lost its sacristy, its weapons porch and its bell tower, all pulled down p...

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Image: EskoG | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pyhämaa: The Refinery That Never Came

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Pyhämaa spent centuries arguing about which parish and which municipality it belonged to. It broke free of Laitila to become a parish in its own right in 1639. A chapel community at Rohdainen followed in 1688, displaced Pyhämaa as the parish centre in 1782, and finally separated ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Pyhämaa: Where the Road Runs Out

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kallerna, CC BY-SA 3.0. At Pamprinniemi, on the north-western tip, the parish of Pyhämaa maintains a protected nature area with a marked trail four and a half kilometres long. The walk explains the place more efficiently than any archive: low granite scoured smooth, wind-cropped pine, water on three sid...

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Image: kallerna | CC BY-SA 3.0