The Skolt Village of Neiden, Norway

One focus of my recent travels in Eastern Finnmark this past August was to learn more about the Skolt Sámi or Eastern Sámi. I'd contacted the staff of the Ä’vv Skolt Sámi Museum in Neiden, Norway, and was encouraged to visit them. One of the staff, Christina Mathisen, who has Skolt heritage, was kind enough to offer to drive me to Neiden from Kirkenes, since she lived in the area.

We passed the airport on the E6 and then headed west and south along the Neiden and Munkefjord, a relatively shallow bay that is now a nature reserve and important home for birdlife. As we drove, I saw the landscape around Kirkenes and the fjord gradually and then quickly change from mostly treeless hills and shorelines to lakes and rivers edged by scrub birch, and to farmland.

The Neiden River

By the time we came to the old Skoltbyen, a preserved village of a few buildings, the landscape resembled northern Finland—unsurprisingly, for the border divides the old Skolt territories. Before 1826, this was a common area, used for grazing reindeer and salmon fishing; after Russia and Norway signed a treaty affirming the state borders, the large siida of Neiden (Njauddâm in the Skolt Sámi language) was split in two and remains so: one side is in Norway and the other is in Finland, which was, until 1920, a Russian duchy. The Finnish town is called Näätämö.

For many centuries there were seven siidas (or sijjdds) in the extensive Skolt territories. Border closures, war, and forced evacuations have left their mark. Many Skolt left the Soviet Union after the Second World War, and now the largest population of Skolt-speaking Sámi live in Northern Finland. Of the c. 1,000 people who still identify as Skolt (sometimes called Eastern Sámi), about 600 live in Finland, 250 in Russia, and just 150 in Norway, where the modern museum, Ä’vv,  was built in 2017. The largest number of Skolt speakers is in Finland. In Norway, the Skolt language largely disappeared around 1900 Among the Nordic Sámi population, estimated at from 80,000 to 100,000, depending on the criteria used, the Skolt have long been a minority and a neglected one. That is changing, at least in Finland and Norway, where younger people have begun to reclaim their identity, and more concrete measures are underway to revitalize the language and make Skolt history and identity visible again.

What is called the Skoltbyen is not a really a village now, but a protected area managed by the museum.   One small building goes back to 1565, though it has been rebuilt several times and its altarpiece and icons are older than the structure. This is the chapel of St. Georg, reputedly built by Saint Trifon, a Russian Orthodox monk who also founded the church at Boris Gleb on the Pasvik River.

St. Georg Chapel, Neiden

Another building from the 1870s still exists, a one- room house that once belonged to Ondre Jakovits and his wife and children. Like the homes of several Skolt families who stayed on in the area, Ondre House is built of split logs; photographs from the early 1900s show few trees in the area, where now there are woods of scrub birch along the strongly flowing Nieden River. Ondre Jakovits is remembered today as a storyteller; in 1918 Isak Saba traveled to Neiden from Vardø in North Varanger to write down several dozen folktales and legends from Jakovits and to translate them into Norwegian. These tales of noaidis, Chudes, and the small folk called Chakkalakkas were included in the first volume of bilingual Sámi folktales and legends published in 1927 by J.K. Qvigstad.

That summer’s day in early August the sound of the river and the sough of the birches cast a mood of enchantment over the Skolt village, but as with so many places in the north of Norway, there's a darker history. Beginning in the late 1300s through the early 1600s, the Skolt buried their dead in a churchyard in the village. In 1915 Johan Brun from the Anatomical Institute at the University of Oslo was responsible for excavating and then removing approximately 94 skeletons from the Neiden churchyard in order to preserve them as part of a much larger project connected with the racial biology studies popular in Norway and Sweden at the time. Although in 1915, the Skolt allowed the excavation, a hundred years later, the Orthodox congregation of Neiden requested the remains back. The remains were returned and reburied in 2011. There’s now an Orthodox memorial on the mound.

The reburial ceremony in Neiden, September 2011 (reburial place, lower right).
Photo: © Tonje P. Solem 2011