Enontekiö

Prehistory and Swedish age

The first human settlement in Enontekiö emerged after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age, when people of the Komsa culture migrated from the coast of the Arctic Ocean. The oldest traces of settlement were found at the shores of the Ounasjärvi Lake and are dated to a time 6,000 BC. Later, the Sami population of Lapland, which predominated for a long time in Enontekiö, developed by the blending of this stone-age ancestral population with speakers of Uralic languages, who immigrated after the 3rd millennium BC. Initially, the inhabitants of Enontekiö made their living from hunting and fishing, and they had only a few reindeer as draught animals.

In early modern times, Enontekiö came under Swedish influence during the course of the Christianisation of the shamanistic Sami. In the 16th century, Enontekiö's first church was built. It was a small wooden building in the village of Rounala on the right shore (today in Sweden) of the Könkämäeno river. According to tradition, the church was erected by three Sami brothers who had converted to Christianity. It was a central meeting point, where Sami people gathered for religious ceremonies, where merchants travelled to sell their wares, and where Swedish officials held judicial courts at particular times. In 1611, a new church was built in the village of Markkina. After the destruction of this church, another one was erected in the same place in 1661.

Since the end of the 17th century, the reindeer-Sami culture, which was based on keeping large herds of reindeer, spread from Norwegian and Swedish Lapland to Enontekiö. The reindeer-Sami of Enontekiö had a nomadic way of life; they moved with their animals between the coniferous forests in the south to Kåfjord, Kvænangen, and Nordreisa (in Norway) on the coast of the Arctic Ocean following the annual cycle of summer and winter grazing land. Enontekiö's last nomads did not settle down until the 1960s, but the culture of the reindeer-Sami is still preserved in the large-scale herding of reindeer. As of the 17th century, the first Finnish people settled down in the south of Enontekiö and introduced the culture of settled agriculture. Due to the Finnish immigration and the assimilation of the old-established Sami population, a Finnish majority emerged over the years.

Grand Duchy of Finland period

In 1809 when Sweden ceded the region of today's Finland to Russia in the Treaty of Fredrikshamn, Enontekiö became a part of the newly founded Grand Duchy of Finland, too. Because the church of Markkina stood on the Swedish—and therefore wrong—side of the river after the Swedish-Russian demarcation, it was torn down in 1826. Its beams were shipped down the Muoniojoki to Palojoensuu, where the church was rebuilt as henceforth the fourth church of Enontekiö. Already in 1864, the church was again moved to Hetta, which had in the meantime became the largest settlement of the region. The closure of the Finnish-Norwegian border in 1852 and the Finnish-Swedish border in 1889 by Russian authorities had severe consequences for Enontekiö's reindeer-nomads, because they could no longer move with their herds to the coast of the Arctic Ocean. As a result, they transferred their grazing areas inland to the southeast and helped spread the culture of reindeer-herding to the remaining parts of Lapland. Due to the separation of the administration of the municipality from the church administration, the political municipality of Enontekiö came into existence in 1877.

After independence

With the Finnish declaration of independence in 1917, Enontekiö became a part of the independent republic of Finland, too.

During the Continuation War (1941–1944), where Finland allied with Germany in fighting against the Soviet Union, Enontekiö, together with all of northern Finland, was part of the operational region of the Wehrmacht. In 1942, the Germans in Enontekiö started to establish the Sturmbock emplacement in occupied Norway and in Petsamo in order to protect the harbours on the Arctic Ocean. When Finland concluded the Moscow Armistice with the Soviet Union on 4 September 1944, committing themselves to expel the German troops, the Finnish-German Lapland War broke out. Lapland's civilian population had to be moved to a safe place in a very short time. Enontekiö's population was evacuated to neutral Sweden together with all of western Lapland's inhabitants. After the Germans quickly left southern Lapland, the 12,000 soldiers of the 7th Gebirgsdivision (Mountain Division) of the Wehrmacht occupied the Sturmbock emplacement at the end of October. During their fallback, the German applied the tactics of scorched earth and devastated Enontekiö, too. During the cold winter, a war of attrition was maintained between German troops, barricaded in their fortifications, and Finnish troops, who took a stand in Markkina. After the Wehrmacht had abandoned Petsamo and northern Norway, the Sturmbock emplacement was no longer of strategic value and was cleared without a struggle at the beginning of January in 1945. In order to secure the flank in Lyngen Municipality, their last emplacement in northern Norway, the Germans still operated in the north of the Käsivarsi region, where minor combat operations took place, before the last Wehrmacht soldiers left Finnish soil on 27 April at Kilpisjärvi.

Enontekiö is located in the region of Lapland in the outermost northwest tip of Finland. The salient between the Swedish and Norwegian borders, which is occupied by the municipality of Enontekiö, is called Käsivarsi (Finnish for "arm"), because before World War II, Finland's borders had the shape of a woman's figure (Suomi-neito) and the area looked like her raised right arm. The municipality occupies a large and sparsely populated area of 8,391.35 km2 (3,239.92 sq mi) (more than three times the area of Luxembourg). Thus Enontekiö is Finland's third-largest municipality in size, after Inari and Sodankylä, and with a population density of only 0.22/km2 (0.57/sq mi), it is the second-most sparsely populated municipality, after Savukoski.

Enontekiö's neighbouring municipalities are Inari in the east, Kittilä in the southeast, and Muonio in the south; on the Swedish side in the west, there is Kiruna Municipality and on the Norwegian side in the north, there are Storfjord Municipality, Gáivuotna Municipality (also known as Kåfjord), Nordreisa Municipality, and Kautokeino Municipality. Enontekiö shares a border of more than 450 kilometres (280 mi) with the two adjacent nations. The border to Sweden is formed by the river Muonionjoki and its tributary, Könkämäeno.