Church at Tornio

View of the wooden Lutheran church and belfry at Tornio.

Photographer: Arthur John Evans
Date of photograph: 15 August 1873
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Finland
Region/Place: Lapland; Tornio
Cultural group: European Finnish
Format: Black and white print (mounted on card)
Size: 73 x 100 mm; 173 x 244 mm (with mount)
Acquisition: Joan Evans. Donated August 1941

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Primary documentation: ‘[p.588] Dr. JOAN EVANS, from the property of the late SIR ARTHUR EVANS, Youlbury, Boars Hill, Oxford. [List of items follows]’; ‘[p.590] 13 photographs mounted on cards. Types & scenery in Lappland. Finland, Sweden. Taken on journey in 1873’: Pitt Rivers Museum accession records (Donations X, 1937–1941), pp.588, 590. Annotations on mount: ‘Wooden Church, & Belfry. (Lutheran)/ TORNEÅ/ Finland’ (written on mount in brown ink).

Research notes: It has been established by Philip Grover that this photograph was taken by Arthur Evans on 15 August 1873, when his travelling party was at Tornio. Evans wrote in his journal of the voyage to Finnish Lapland: ‘I have taken the church - The churchyard is extremely interesting, especially the corner where the Finnish graves are - though far the larger number of the monuments are inscribed in Swedish - possibly because the Swedes are the best off of the population[.] The Finnish ones are all wood engraved or painted in Russian letters & some with little Imperial or Orthodox crucifixes on them - they are most of them crosses transfixed with perverse slantendicular slips of wood but some like miniature barns or wooden houses, windows & all - with a crosslet on top’ (entry dated 15 August 1873): Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans Archive, B/2/1, Box 1, Notebook 1, pp.60–61. For more information on Arthur Evans’ voyage to Finnish Lapland in 1873, see Joan Evans, Time and Chance: The Story of Arthur Evans and His Forebears (London, 1943), pp.172–176; Ann Brown, Before Knossos...: Arthur Evans’s Travels in the Balkans and Crete (Oxford, 1993), pp.14–16, 90; and Tony Lurcock, No Particular Hurry: British Travellers in Finland, 1830-1917 (London, 2013), pp.123–134, 250.