Sottunga is an island-community in Åland’s eastern archipelago. It’s borders form a triangular star with one point out into Skiftet, one up into Delet and one into the Bay of Kökar. The total area is 342.47 square kilometers of which 315.69 are water and 26.78 land. The cultivated acreage is 154 hectares, the forest comprises about 1000 hectares and the rest is meadowland and impediment. Sottunga’s highest mountain Kasberget is about 25 meters high. Sandskär Island is especially beautiful. Villages with previous or current permanent settlements are Mosshaga in the north and Finnö, Södö, Husö and Hästö in the south. Husö has always been inhabited and Finnö has received new settlers.

The island named Sandskar has a nature that differs from the other islands.

Natural scenery from the west side of Sottunga.

The population was largest at the end of the 1920’s when it reached almost 400. Now we are about 130, which have remained pretty permanent. The population prediction done in the 1960’s did not come true. It was estimated that the population would be below 25 by the 1990’s. Sottunga is small, clearly the smallest municipality in Finland and possibly in the whole EU. However, the basic services function well. It now has a school, classes one to nine, kindergarten, daily health services, a store, postal service, a bank, a library, an Internet Café, our own congregation, own church, communal office, helicopter transportation to the hospital and good communications with the rest of the world etc.
In the beginning the school rotated sites, that is, the instruction was done for short periods in different places and the teacher traveled from place to place. The old school was built in 1903 and a residence for the teacher was added in the early 1920’s (the present Hembygdsgården). In the beginning the teaching was done by the pastor. The current school was finished in 1957. Home schooling was done during the 1920’s in the southern distant villages of Finnö.
Sottunga was located some distance from the main postal route across Åland, but there was a reserve route via Mosshaga and Sottunga that could be used when the Bay Delet was impassable. Sottunga received its own postal service in 1896 when a post office was opened at Nybondas farm.
A Country store had been run at the croft Tännäs ca 1895-1930 and at other locations, but these were discontinued gradually after the Sottunga Cooperative Business was founded in 1921 and it opened a store in an old croft. The cooperative store was moved to a new location in 1937 and it was enlarged and changed to a supermarket in 1968.

Exterior from the only shop in the village, a cooperative called Sottunga Andelshandel.

A telephone company was founded in the beginning of the 1920’s and, to start with, one could use it only within Sottunga. About 1930 a phone line was drawn to the neighbor community and now they had contact with the surrounding world. Of all the other inventions made during my grandmother’s time, she thought that the telephone was the best.
Electricity came to Sottunga in 1959. The same year an antenna was built on Ormhälla Mountain to relay TV-programs from Europe to Finland.
The youth organization Hembygdens Vänner in Sottunga was founded in 1907 and in 1927 an old Russian barracks was moved from Föglö to Sottunga and rebuilt to a youth hall and named Sunnanberg. A midsummer-pole has been raised yearly since the 1800’s.
Sottunga has never been a popular tourist attraction. One inn and a few homes received the first summer-guests. Nowadays there are two cottage-villages, one in Sottunga with about 20 cottages and one on Husö with about 30 cottages.
Sottunga Hembygdsförening was founded in 1989 and rebuilt the old school building to be used as a community hall for gatherings and exhibits.

Old homestead museum. On the hill behind the museum stands the wind mill.

Transportation to and from Sottunga was done with your own boat. During inclement weather, sometimes up to 50 through-travelers were provided quarters in Sottunga. Not until the beginning of the 1900’s, was a more regular traffic system started, then to the newly finished dock “Bryggan”. Ships of many kinds and sizes followed each other and most troublesome was the uncertainty about the boat’s arrival. From Sottunga the traffic went southward to Kökar. The winter always brought problems. During icy winters, all boats had difficulty approaching the dock. Goods and passengers had to be picked up from the ice cover as the boat was stopping in the open channel in the ice. On Buskskär a cottage was built for a dock guard, who was supposed to help the people from the outer villages and Kökar to cross the open channel in the ice. A big improvement happened when M/S Kökar in 1967 started daily traffic to the mainland of Åland. Nowadays the harbor area is equipped with guest docks, food service, a service area for boaters and cyclists and a kiosk.

One of the ferries for car and passenger tranportation to and from the island. This is called m/s Gudingen, the other is m/s Skiftet.

Towards the end of 1800, the widespread use of sailing-vessels began. Schooners transported firewood to Stockholm and brought iron-ore from Uppland to Dalsbruk. Sumpar (boats with well-boxes for living fish) sailed with living fish but also other goods. The number of sailing-vessels in Sottunga increased yearly to at least 16 in 1911. Dione and Frid II were the only large ships built for Sottunga and Frid II was built in Sottunga. This era was over at the end of the 1930’s.
Sottunga was permanently settled some time during the eleventh-century, same as the rest of the eastern archipelago, but there are signs of even older temporary settlers. There are some ring-shaped rock formations, 4-5 meters in diameter, which most likely had been overnight shelters for hunters.

The time when Sottunga became permanently inhabited can be estimated using the old names of the places and knowledge of the continuing rise of the land, that is, one can determine the location of the shoreline when the island was populated. The names above the shoreline, during that time, should be of the land-name type such as marsh, headland, mountain, valley and the names below the shoreline should have to do with water, such as bay, islet, strait although they are on the dry land today. The border between these types of names nowadays runs about 5 meters above the current water level, which indicates that the population started around the year 1000.
The name Sottunga belongs to a group of very old place-names. It is much older than from the eleventh century and describes a place where people were living. Thus, Sottunga cannot have been the name of the island before it was populated. It is probably a name the first population had brought with it.
It appears that there originally were about 13 homesteads on Sottunga. In 1661 there were only ten households left and in 1675 one farmer moved to Finnö and gave his homestead to the nine remaining farmers. From then on, Sottunga has had nine farms and the names of five of them originated in Christian names. These farms all existed during the middle of the sixteenth century.

A different type of population arrived in connection with the establishing of Swedish allotment military boatsmen crofts. Boatsmen names were Qwick, Strömbeck and Styf. Styf lived on Finnö.The croft-population did not arrive until in the 1800’s and many of the crofts are still standing. The boatsmen were usually also craftsmen such as shoemakers, tailors, turners, carpenters, or skippers and sailors on their own vessels or working for others.
In the 1600’s the population in Sottunga was around 70. In the beginning of the 1700’s, the Great Northern War started. The entire population of Åland fled to Sweden during the years 1714-22. All the families returned to their farms in Sottunga except to Mosshaga. Everything was overgrown, devastated and burnt down. There is a notation about the church that “the altar picture was burnt together with the chapel”.
During the war of 1808-09, the Swedish soldiers practiced the scorched earth policy and in January 1809 they burned down practically all the buildings in Sottunga causing great difficulties for the people. They had to flee to the neighboring community Föglö with their cattle and all their belongings. When the cattle fell down on the ice, the soldiers slaughtered them. New log-buildings were put up on a different site and later disassembled and moved to Sottunga. The rebuilding of Sottunga lasted for decades.
An inscription on a mountain on Södö indicates that King Gustaf IV Adolf visited the area in the year 1800.

When the piloting was taken over by the Russians, the majority of pilots refused to continue their service. One sailor from Sottunga was interned during World War I in Germany and thought to have disappeared, but he returned after 3 years. The medic Victor Genzel, born on the slope of the Altai Mountains in Siberia, remained when the Russians retreated from Åland in 1917 and lived the rest of his colorful life on Sottunga and made his livelihood as a fisherman. He was the local “doctor” and sold medications out of a pharmacy chest. Emigration tempted many from Sottunga and most of them went to America (about 100). Five Lindström siblings moved to the Seattle area, one person went to Germany and some went to Australia. In the middle of the 1900’s emigration to Sweden was common.
During the Winter War 1939-40 many bombs were dropped on Sottunga. Their targets were ships at Bryggan and Husö and many bomb craters resulted from this. On the 24th of January 1940, the freighter S/S Notung was sunk NE of Sottunga, where it lay frozen in the ice. The crew was able to get to shore. Towards the end of World War II, three Finnish sailors from Sottunga were interned in the Stutthof concentration camp in Germany. They survived and eventually returned home.
In the year 1544 Sottunga became a is for the first time mentioned as a chaplainry. A seafarer’s chapel was located about one km from the present church. The first church was built on the present location in 1661. It was burnt down during the Great Wrath. The new church was built on the same spot. A tower was built on the east part of the church, but it was later removed and replaced by a choir-area. The present bell-tower was built in 1770. A thorough renovation and addition to the church was completed in 1802. The church fence was built in1838. The current altar- painting was painted by P.Berggren in Stockholm in1845 and represents the Holy Communion. The church-ship was made in the 1700’s by a man from Kökar, who had promised to make two church-ships, one for Kökar and one for Sottunga, if he would get home alive from imprisonment by pirates in northern Africa. Sottunga got its first pastor in 1708.

The small wooden church of Sottunga. On this place already 1661.

The cemetery is beautifully sloping downwards to the bay Kyrkviken.

Iron ore was discovered on Södö in 1835, according to notations by the guild master of the pilots. The trial mining started in 1839 and real mining was done during the summers of 1843 to 1847. In total, only about 1700 tons of iron ore was mined and the whole undertaking was deemed a fiasco. In the beginning, the workforce consisted of 35 men but as the summer went on, men began to leave in order to harvest the hay at home and among the remainder, many were very prone to drunkenness. Ten prisoners did the mining work for one more year. The powder cellar still remains on Södö.
Sottunga has always been located on the great shipping lane between Finland and Sweden. The main lane went through Småsottunga (Finnö), but it is now called the “Small passage” because the rising land has made the passage shallow. The current “Big passage” was started in the 1700’s.
There have been two pilot stations, Sottunga and Mosshaga. On Mosshaga the pilots were almost always living in Mosshaga. This station was closed in 1918 and moved to the neighboring community. The Sottunga pilot station lay on the main shipping lane and has functioned there at least since the farmers moved to Finnö in 1675. Sälsö pilot-cabin was built in 1857 and has provided work for many Sottunga generations. The activity stopped in 1968, after about 300 years, when it was moved to mainland Åland.

A Winter scenery from the village Norrbyn.

Agriculture, in older times, provided only enough for self-sustenance. Hunting and fishing have consequently been important and also provided an opportunity to earn some real money. The seal-hunt was especially important, but it ended a long time ago. The spring hunt of seafowl has been important to provide fresh meat after the winter and it still continues. The fishing has gone through many different periods, using different gear and fishing for many kinds of fish. Fishing for pike was mostly done with traps (bow-net) and fishing for herring with dragnet. During summer, pike was also netted from the shore.
During harvest time, harvesting and threshing was done during the day and fishing in the morning and evening. Lots of winter fishing for herring was done in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Periodically the catch was plentiful and contributed significantly to the livelihood. At this time it was already possible to transport fresh fish to Åbo. Smoking of herring has been very common in Sottunga. Many fishing harbors had smokehouses for fish. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, fishing for herring was done with the trawler “Vastï” and at the end of this period a great deal of cod was caught with nets. Nowadays fishing is done only for household need.

Boat-houses in the fisherrmen’r harbour called Skage.

During the years 1953-54, agriculture took a new direction, which has meant a lot for Sottunga and its ability to survive as an independent community. The cultivation of sugar beets was started and the delivery of milk to the dairy. Nobody had predicted what a good combination of activities they had invented. This combination continued till year 2008. Harvesting of the beets and loading the beets on the boats was a familiar picture in Sottunga and it required a lot of work. Even though the number of farms is reducing, all farming land is in use.

To send milk to the dairy was quite revolutionary in the beginning, because one now was paid for the milk. In the beginning, ca 1952-67, the transportation of the milk was a big problem. It was usually done with motorboat, but from 1967 it has been transported on the public ferries. To start with, milk was delivered from almost 40 households, while today there are only 3 suppliers. The total amount of milk delivered is now at least 4 times more in spite of fewer cows. The farmers were convinced of the benefit in sending milk to the dairy, when they realized that one cow did not produce enough milk products for a whole family if every thing was done at home. However, money was left over if the milk was sent to the dairy and butter was purchased from the dairy.
The work in the cow-barn and the handling of the milk is still very demanding, heavy and time-dependent, in spite of modern machinery and equipment and a relief system which functions very well.
The conclusion is that the combination of milk-cows, sugar-beet cultivation, limited farming land and the will to work hard has been a successful combination for Sottunga. The basic livelihoods remain. The disadvantage is that the dairy cattle and the farming do not create more jobs.

The people in Sottunga are known for their peaceable nature and work ethic. The visitor E.D. Clark wrote already in1799 that “they are the most handsome and the strongest people on Åland”. Their industriousness expresses itself in hard work, stubbornness and an ability to achieve the maximum.
One must also appreciate the presence of strong personalities and teachers both now and in earlier times. The clergy has greatly influenced the character and the conception of life of the population, especially in earlier days. It is possible that the Chaplain Johan Salmelin has had special influence on the people of Sottunga, possibly until present days.
He acted as pastor in Sottunga for 53 years, between the years of 1792 and 1845.


By Björn Rönnlöf
Translated by Ulla Forsström.