Church at Rovaniemi

View of the wooden Lutheran church and belfry at Rovaniemi.

Photographer: Arthur John Evans
Date of photograph: 18 August 1873
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Finland
Region/Place: Lapland; Rovaniemi
Cultural group: European Finnish
Format: Black and white print (mounted on card)
Size: 74 x 99 mm; 174 x 245 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)/ ROVANIEMI/ On the Arctic Circle’ (written on mount in brown ink).

Research notes: It has been established by Philip Grover that this photograph was taken by Arthur Evans on 18 August 1873, when his travelling party was at Rovaniemi. Evans wrote in his journal of the voyage to Finnish Lapland: ‘I was uncommonly glad of my sunshade when walking out to see the queer Lutheran church & wooden belfry at Rovaniemi before starting once more on our way northwards[.] In the churchyard there were no monuments except one new stone one - & it seems as if the graves had been dug up for there were square grass grown pits instead of mounds’ (entry dated 18 August 1873): Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans Archive, B/2/1, Box 1, Notebook 1, p.78. 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.