Pajala
Encyclopedia
Pajala is a locality
Urban areas in Sweden
Urban area is a common English translation of the Swedish term tätort. The official term in English, used by Statistics Sweden, is, however, locality. There are 1,940 localities in Sweden . They could be compared with census-designated places in the United States.A tätort in Sweden has a minimum of...

 and the seat of Pajala Municipality
Pajala Municipality
Pajala Municipality is a municipality in Norrbotten County in northern Sweden, bordering Finland. Its seat is located in Pajala.In 1884 Tärendö was detached from Pajala Municipality, forming a municipality of its own. In 1914 Pajala Municipality was once again split when Junosuando broke away...

 in Norrbotten County
Norrbotten County
Norrbotten County is the northernmost county or län of Sweden. It borders Västerbotten County to the southwest, the Gulf of Bothnia to the southeast. It also borders the counties of Nordland and Troms in Norway to the northwest, and Lapland Province in Finland to the northeast.The name...

, Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 with 1,985 inhabitants in 2005.

History

Lars Levi Læstadius
Lars Levi Læstadius
Lars Levi Læstadius was a Swedish Lutheran pastor of partly Sami ancestry. From the mid 1840s and onward he became the leader of the Laestadian movement...

 lived and worked in Pajala Municipality in the middle of the 19th century. More precisely his place of residence was Kengis
Kengis
Kengis is a small rural community in northernmost Sweden and located very near to the Finnish border.-History:In 1644, two Swedish noblemen, later called Renstierna , set up a forge in the Swedish village Pajala north of the Polar circle...

, but during 1869 Læstadii house, grave and the whole church of Kengis was moved to Pajala.

The town was mistakenly bombed by Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 airplanes during the Finnish
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

 Winter War
Winter War
The Winter War was a military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland. It began with a Soviet offensive on 30 November 1939 – three months after the start of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland – and ended on 13 March 1940 with the Moscow Peace Treaty...

, in the spring 1940. Seven planes dropped 134 bombs, a mix of explosive and firebombs, causing six buildings to burn down, badly damaging telephone wires and making the streets impossible to drive on with 43 big craters. No human casualties were recorded, albeit two persons were slightly injured. Soviet officers later inspected the destruction and the Soviet Union paid damage adjustments during 1940.

Literature about Pajala

The events in Mikael Niemi
Mikael Niemi
Mikael Niemi is a Swedish author. He wrote the novel Populärmusik från Vittula . It is the story of a young boy, Matti, growing up in Pajala in the 1960s and is recounted in a humorous way...

's book "Populärmusik från Vittula" (Pop Music from Vittula) occur mainly in Pajala. Vittula, or more properly Vittulajänkkä, is a colloquial denotion for a certain garden suburb in Pajala.

In another portrait over Pajala by this author the book "Mannen som dog som en lax" (The Man who Died like a Salmon). In this criminal novel the author relates to the state of the minority language Meänkieli
Meänkieli
Meänkieli is the name used in Sweden for Finnish dialects spoken in the northernmost parts of the country, around the valley of the Torne River....

's situation in Pajala of today.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK