Qualla: Sädvvájávrre

Sädvvájávrre: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Skogsfrun, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2002, two local people walking the drawn-down shore of Sädvvájávrre found a human skull in the mud. The reservoir had been doing this for years - filling, emptying, scouring - and each cycle stripped a little more soil from a low headland on the southern side. What the water had finally uncovered was a churchyard nobody had managed to locate precisely: the burial ground of Silbojokk, a parish that existed for 137 years and then simply stopped. The lake is 40.1 square kilometres, 120 metres deep in places, and today it is an engineering component of the Skellefte River. It is also an accidental excavation, running one slow cut a year.

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Image: Skogsfrun | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sädvvájávrre: A Smelter at the Rapids

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nasko, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between 1635 and 1659 the southern shore of this lake, near the outlet of the Silbbajåhkå stream, held the smelting works of the Nasafjäll silver mine. The stream mattered: its rapids had enough fall to drive the bellows. The forest mattered more. Extensive pine stands ringed the...

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Image: Nasko | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sädvvájávrre: A Parish of Eighty

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nasko, CC BY-SA 4.0. Where a smelter went, a parish followed. Silbojokk was formally constituted in 1640 and received its first vicar, Johannes Byrelius, the same year. Little is recorded of the first church building. After the works were destroyed it was not rebuilt, yet the congregation carried on ...

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Image: Nasko | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sädvvájávrre: August 1659

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Skogsfrun, CC BY-SA 4.0. The end of the first mining period came from the west. In August 1659 a Norwegian force under Preben von Ahnen - a Danish-Norwegian bailiff who spent twenty years as a district officer in Nordland - crossed the mountains, plundered the mine and burned it, along with the smelter a...

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Image: Skogsfrun | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sädvvájávrre: The Reservoir

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Skogsfrun, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sädvvájávrre sits at the head of the Skellefte River, which is now almost fully developed for hydroelectricity, and the lake's job is long-term storage - holding water through the year so that the stations downstream can release it when demand requires. It has been regulated thre...

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Image: Skogsfrun | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sädvvájávrre: What the Water Uncovered

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Skogsfrun, CC BY-SA 4.0. Archaeologists dug ahead of the 1985 raising, in 1983 and 1984, excavating the smelter and its outbuildings and examining a smithy north of the stream. On the headland called Kyrkudden they found a structure they tentatively read as a church - but no burials nearby, which left th...

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Image: Skogsfrun | CC BY-SA 4.0