This week project researcher Dr. Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto will visit Oslo Universitet together with other representatives of the Swedish Literature Society of Finland (Svenska litteratur sällskapet I Finland). She will introduce the Research project Lapland’s Dark Heritage in a seminar about Cultural heritage and materiality (Kulturarv och materialitet) at the University of Oslo. The seminar will be led by Professor Anne Eriksen.

Later this week Koskinen-Koivisto will also speak to students and researchers at the ethnology club at the University of Jyväskylä. Her presentation addresses the collaboration between the research project and museums introducing the museum visitor survey conducted at the Provincial Museum of Lapland and the public excavations organized together with the National Sámi Museum Siida. The club night will be part of the program of Spring School organized by Suomen Kansantietouden tutkijain Seura (Association of Finnish Folklorists). The event is open to the public. The language of the event is Finnish.

The Journal of Field Archaeology published a new article by Suzie Thomas, Oula Seitsonen and Vesa-Pekka Herva.

‘Nazi memorabilia, dark heritage and treasure hunting as  “alternative” tourism: understanding the fascination with the material remains of World War II in Northern Finland’ is currently available online, and will appear in print later in the year. Following this link leads to 50 free downloads (first come, first served!)

The article’s abstract is as follows:

Sites connected to the Second World War (WWII) are increasingly recognized as worthy of archaeological investigation. Researchers are also becoming aware that that the collectors market in objects connected to WWII, particularly those connected to Germany, is encouraging the stripping of conflict landscapes in the search for “collectors items.” Finnish Lapland is sometimes regarded as peripheral compared to more centrally located regions of Europe. Archaeologists working here nonetheless find themselves in direct competition with enthusiastic treasure hunters. This is complicated even further by the myriad ontologies employed by different individuals in the construction of their relationship with the material culture connected to recent conflict periods, and on specific “other” or “exotic” landscapes, such as Lapland. This paper examines what might be learnt about the nature of treasure hunting for and trading in WWII material from Lapland, and its position within the emerging research on broader trends in “dark” approaches to and encounters with heritage.

You can also contact us directly for more information about this article.

This Tuesday, project PI Professor Vesa-Pekka Herva will give a guest lecture at the University of Tromsø.

View of Tromsø, image by Lars Tiede available under CC-BY-SA-2.5 license.

His presentation is titled “Why the attraction to the heritage of the WWII German military presence in Finnish Lapland?”

“This talk discusses the diverse interests in the material heritage of the German military presence in Finnish Lapland during the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on non-professional or ‘alternative’ engagements with German sites and artefacts. Finland cooperated with Germany during the war and over 200,000 German troops were based in northern Finland. The German military presence in Finland had significant impacts on northern Finnish mindscapes and landscapes and left behind a rich, yet largely overlooked heritage. People have nonetheless engaged with this ‘dark heritage’ in various ways after the war and up to the present. This talk considers the motivations and meanings of treasure hunting, militaria collecting, and other such forms of engaging with German materialities in northern Finland.”

Project Researcher Suzie Thomas is going to Belgium this week for a week of research mobility with our colleagues at Vrije Universiteit  Brussel (VUB).  She will also be spending time in Ieper (Ypres), Ghent and various other parts of Flanders interviewing people about the material legacy of the First and Second World Wars, in order to gather comparative data to our research in Lapland.

On Wednesday 20th April she will give a public lecture at VUB entitled “Lapland’s Dark Heritage: Understanding Encounters with the Material Legacy of the Second World War in Northern Finland”

The abstract for her lecture, which starts at 18:30 at Room E.011 at the VUB Campus, is as follows:

In this presentation I will discuss the growth of research into the concept of ”dark heritage”, which draws from related ideas such as dark tourism, contested heritage and difficult histories. In particular, I will focus on the research project with which I currently work, entitled “Lapland’s Dark Heritage”. This is a collaborative study involving scholars from the Universities of Helsinki and Oulu, and is funded by the Academy of Finland.

“Lapland’s Dark Heritage” seeks to understand, through interdisciplinary approaches, the diverse and sometimes surprising engagements and interactions between people in the present day, and the material culture left by the Second World War in Finnish Lapland. As will be seen, this is arguably a difficult history (a “dark” heritage) – dealing as it does with Finland’s and Nazi Germany’s military cooperation, prisoner of war encampments, mass evacuations, and the destruction of many of Lapland’s settlements and infrastructure during the 1944-45 Lapland War. Yet at the same time, the early 1940s also represented something of an economic boon for the region, and many new people (mostly German soldiers) arrived in the area and formed friendships and relationships with the local population. Consequently, not all perceptions of the era are negative. This leads us to consider the extent to which this is indeed a “dark” heritage, after all.

Shrapnel from WWI, at Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres. Image by Sandra Fauconnier, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Oula Seitsonen takes part in ‘Dialogues with the Past’ seminar at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford. Oula presents a paper titled “‘Where the f… is Vuotso’ or ‘Can you love a Nazi?’: Dark Heritage of German Second World War presence in Lapland, Northern Finland”, exploring the diverse complexities and politically-inclined aspects related to our research of Second World War material heritage. Paper presents two case studies, first dealing with the German material legacy at Vuotso, Sodankylä and its commemoration, and the other with Provincial Museum of Lapland’s “Wir waren freunde – We were friends” exhibition’s advertisement matchboxes, banned in 2015 by the municipality.

Finnish and German flags fly side by side on the birthday of Marshall Mannerheim (SA-kuva).

Matchbox used for for advertising the “Wir waren freunde” exhibition, later banned by the municipality (Kuva: Bikka Puoskari / Yle).

In early 2016 , Museoliitto – the Museums Association of Finland, published Museoetiikka 2.0, the proceedings of the Museum Ethics conference held in 2015 at the University of Jyväskylä, and organised by the Museology students of Jyväskylä in partnership with ICOM Finland.

The conference, which featured presentations in both Finnish and English, covered various ethical issues for that museum professionals may face. Lapland’s Dark Heritage Researcher Suzie Thomas gave a keynote presentation on international trafficking of cultural objects.

The resulting publication includes Thomas’ paper, entitled “International Trafficking of Cultural Property: Global and Local Perspectives“. The article draws on some of the data from the Lapland’s Dark Hertiage project.

The publication is open access and available via Museoliitto’s website.

Project Researchers Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, Oula Seitsonen and Suzie Thomas are returning to Rovaniemi for a few days in which they will carry out further interviews with various individuals.

Inside Arktikum – the home of the Provincial Museum of Lapland. Photo by: Suzie Thomas.

Among other things, they will talk with the staff of the Provincial Museum of Lapland as they reflect on their recent temporary exhibition “Wir waren Freunde / Olimme ystäviä / We were friends”.

On 10 and 11 March 2016 there will be conference, organized by Associate Professor Laura McAtackney and Århus University, and hosted by the Moesgård Museum, Denmark.

The conference is entitled “Dark Heritage: Public Interest and Scholarly Engagement with Difficult, Recent Pasts”.  Among the international speakers is Lapland’s Dark Heritage Researcher Suzie Thomas, who will present a paper titled ‘“Wir sind noch Freunde”: Exhibiting the dark heritage of Finnish-German collaboration in the Second World War’. There is also a keynote presentation from Dr Philip Stone, Executive Director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.

The conference is free to attend, but advance registration is required. To register, and to view further details about the conference including list of confirmed speakers, visit the conference web page.

Published on 30th December, the fourth issue of 2015 from the art history e-journal TAHITI features a column by project researcher Suzie Thomas. The column, titled “Cultural Environments, Art History, and dark heritage“, reflected upon the TAHITI-6 -the National Conference of Art History in Finland which took place at the University of Jyväskylä in February 2015. At that event Suzie gave a keynote lecture on the conference’s theme of cultural environments, drawing on our project research in Lapland.

Suzie Thomas in Dresden, Germany, in May 2015.

In the column, she further discusses the interdisciplinary nature of researching cultural environments generally, and especially the value of multiple approaches and perspectives to Lapland’s Dark Heritage. The column and the rest of the TAHITI journal are open access. Most articles are in Finnish with a smaller selection in English. Other issues also feature articles in Swedish.

We wish everybody peaceful and happy holidays! Soon after New Years we will update information on our upcoming, exciting public excavations at German sites in Inari, Lapland, and about our community heritage plans in summer 2016.

Christmas on front in 1942, Santa Claus has arrived (SA-Kuva).