Kokkola (Swedish: Karleby formerly Gamlakarleby) is a city in
Finland and the regional center of Central Ostrobothnia, located on
the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia in the province of Central
Ostrobothnia. Kokkola is located about 120 kilometers north of Vaasa
and about 200 kilometers south of Oulu. 400 years will have passed
since the establishment of Kokkola in 2020.
The neighboring
municipalities of Kokkola are Halsua, Kalajoki, Kannus, Kaustinen,
Kruunupyy, Lestijärvi, Luoto and Toholampi. Pietarsaari is located
37 kilometers southwest of Kokkola.
The city is home to
47,792 people (June 30, 2020), of whom 49.1 percent are men and 50.9
percent are women. The municipality is bilingual: 84.2 per cent of
the inhabitants speak Finnish as their mother tongue, 13.5 per cent
speak Swedish and 2.3 per cent speak other languages. Kokkola is the
northernmost bilingual municipality in Finland.
Origin of the name
In the oldest Swedish-language sources,
Kokkola is mentioned as Karlaby, which has been inferred to mean a
village of men, peasants. Kokkola probably got its Finnish name from
the narrow bay near the city, Kokkolahti, on the shore stones of
which the cocoons, or sea eagles, are said to have sat. According to
another theory, the name comes from a guard fire, a size that was
burned when hostilities threatened.
In the case of the city of Kokkola, the sea was still
flowing around the beginning of time. The present Kirkonmäki rose
from the sea in the 8th century, and your small back, which later
formed the village of Ristiranta and the town of Kokkola, did not
separate from the Gulf of Bothnia until the 12th century. The
uprising in the area still continues, and is about 88 centimeters in
the century.
Already in the 14th century, the area of
present-day Kirkonmäki (Kaarlela) had a harbor, a market place and
a wooden church. The Kokkola Chapel Parish probably originated in
1467. Kokkola resigned from Pedersöre Parish Church as an
independent parishioner no later than 1489. Today, the stone church
called Kaarlela Church was built in the late 15th century - probably
at the same time as the Kokkola parish was founded.
Establishment of the city
Kokkola is the regional center of
Central Ostrobothnia and the center of the Kokkola region. The city
of Kokkola was founded by Gustav II Adolf on September 7, 1620, on
the site of the village of Ristiranta on the west side of Kaarlela
church hill, mainly on the lands of Sund Manor. Due to the uplift,
the water connection from Kirkonmäki to the sea had already
deteriorated and seemed to continue to deteriorate. The town was
named Gamlakarleby at the time, and a three-flame, overturned tar
barrel burned on its coat of arms. In the same year, Uusikaarlepyy
(Nykarleby) was also established, which also has a three-flame but
upright tar barrel on its coat of arms.
In 1664, a large fire
destroyed the city, after which J. Gedda drew up a grid layout for
the city. The grid layout drawn up at that time has largely survived
in the area of the old town to this day.
The period of
great hatred associated with the Great Northern War in the first
half of the 18th century caused considerable losses and losses in
Kokkola, as elsewhere in Ostrobothnia. Although part of the
population was able to flee to Sweden, a large part of the city’s
population was killed and taken prisoner by Russian troops. At the
end of the Great Fury, Kokkola, ravaged by war and plague, had only
78 inhabitants, but the city recovered rapidly, and by the turn of
the 1750s, the population was already nearly a thousand.
Kokkola acquired the right to stand in 1765, which guaranteed the
city the opportunity to do business directly with foreign trading
houses. In practice, this meant that the Kokkola ships sailed
farther and farther in the world's seas and the ship sizes grew at
the same pace.
The end of the 18th century and the beginning
of the 19th century were a time of prosperity in Kokkola. The city's
export items included, above all, tar and shipbuilding. Ships from
Kokkola were sold to Stockholm, Copenhagen and London, among others,
as well as other European port cities. Tar, on the other hand, was
Finland's first real world trade commodity, and in the era of
sailing ships, Finland was one of the most important tar producers
in the world. The Kokkola region accounted for as much as a third of
Finland's total tar production.
The time of Russian rule
The transition to Russian rule knew economic growth in Kokkola.
Timber, tar, butter and cheese, as well as potash, were exported.
The city prospered at a rapid pace, and the Upper City, Oppistan,
began to rise with handsome two-story homes for the bourgeoisie. In
1842, the Town Hall, designed by Carl Ludvig Engel, was completed on
the edge of the market square, now Mannerheiminaukio. Opposite the
town hall, the former Libeck Hospital was completed in 1810. The
workers lived in Alakaupunki, Neristan, also known as the Old Town
of Kokkola.
The heyday of shipbuilding in Kokkola dates back
to the 1820s and 1830s. At that time, as many as three of the
country's eight privileged ship sculptures were located in Kokkola,
on the shores of Kaustarinlahti.
In the middle of the 19th
century, the Crimean War broke out, also known as the "terrible"
Ooland War. Kokkola's participation in that war did not remain
completely modest, for in 1854 a battle was fought in Kokkola known
as the Halkokari skirmish. In the skirmish, the Kokkola people
repelled the English invaders, which attracted widespread attention
throughout the country, all the way to Emperor Nicholas I.
1800s after the mid Kokkola's economic growth came to a halt a
little. The reasons for this were e.g. new types of ships that no
longer needed tar to protect. As steam engines became more common,
iron-hulled ships also began to become more common. However, there
was no possibility to manufacture iron-hulled ships in Kokkola, and
so shipbuilding also ceased. The Saimaa Canal, which was completed
at the same time, also weakened Kokkola's position as a commercial
port, when the keepers of Inner Finland and Savo began sending their
products along the new shipping route to the centers of the Gulf of
Finland. As a result of the economic downturn, more and more Kokkola
residents applied to America. The peak of migration was around the
turn of the century.
The railway was brought to Kokkola in
1885. Looking at the map, it is easy to see that the Ostrobothnian
Railway makes quite a bend at Kokkola. In Kokkola, it is known that
when designing the railway network, Russian Emperor Alexander II
remembered the Halkokari brawl and the brave Kokkola residents and
rewarded them by ordering the railway to be towed through Kokkola.
Kokkola in the 20th century
The most significant event during
the Finnish Civil War in Kokkola was the disarmament of the Russian
garrison. White troops from neighboring municipalities also took
part in the conquest of Kokkola. The Kokkola residents, who joined
the Red Guard, were imprisoned at an early stage without having had
time to fight. After the end of the war, business began to recover
in Kokkola.
1900s most essential changes in the first half of
Kokkola in Finland at the sitting of the population. Kokkola the
northern and eastern side of the Finnish-speaking population of
rural municipalities filed for Kokkola, who offered the newcomers
work in the factories, the port and the service sectors. Language
disputes were not avoided either.
The municipality of
Kaarlela (Swedish: Karleby), known until 1927 as the countryside of
Kokkola, was annexed to Kokkola in early 1977. Kaarlela had
previously been connected to the municipality of Öja, which belonged
as part of Kruunupyy until 1932, when it became an independent
municipality. In connection with the association of Kokkola and
Kaarlela municipalities, the Swedish name of Kokkola became Karleby.
In connection with the municipal association, the population of
Kokkola increased by about 50 per cent and the area by about 1,100
per cent. With the union of municipalities, a kind of circle closed:
the village of Kaarlela's Ristiranta originated the city of Kokkola,
to which Kaarlela was annexed more than 300 years later.
Municipal associations
The municipality of Kaarlela was annexed
to Kokkola in 1977.
On 3 December 2007, the councils of
Lohtaja, Kälviä and Ullava decided on a municipal association with
Kokkola. The union came into force on January 1, 2009, when they
formed a new city of more than 45,000 inhabitants. The name of the
new city became Kokkola and the coat of arms was the current coat of
arms of Kokkola. As Lohtaja, Kälviä and Ullava were all monolingual
Finnish-speaking municipalities and Kokkola was bilingual (Finnish
as the majority language), the percentage of Swedish-speaking
residents of Kokkola decreased somewhat, but the municipality
remained bilingual.