Pyhän Henrikin saarnahuone ja sen historiallinen ympäristö

English translation (from the Finnish)

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Description

The preaching house on the bank of the Kokemäenjoki has for centuries been associated with Pyhä Henrik, the only local saint of the Catholic period. The memorial chapel built to shelter the granary storehouse regarded as a preaching house dates from the early 19th century, when interest in the nation's own history and its great men was awakening.

On the Kokemäenjoki's bank, in the area of the medieval Teljä trading place, stands an octagonal brick chapel in the neo-Gothic style, built to protect a small log building that tradition links with the preaching journeys of Finland's national saint, Bishop Henrik, around the mid-12th century. It is believed that Bishop Henrik spent the night in the building or preached there. The earliest written sources, from the early 17th century, mention the site as a place of pilgrimage.

An area bordering the Kokemäenjoki has been separated from the surroundings of the preaching house and made into a park, laid out according to a plan by the architect G.Th. Chiewitz.

On either side of the chapel, at the edges of wide open fields, are the farm centres of Kylä-Horelli, Malmi, Mäki-Horelli, Mäki-Ketala, Kylä-Pertola and Ala-Parma, with their park-like courtyards.

History

Henrik is regarded as the first bishop of Finland, and his arrival in Finland at the beginning of the second millennium, according to the traditional view, marked the bringing of Finland within the sphere of Christianity. According to folk tradition, the granary storehouse or preaching house of Bishop Henrik at Kokemäki was linked to his fatal journey to Köyliö and became a place of pilgrimage after the bishop's death.

In 1839, the vicar Frans Petter von Knorring, born at Kokemäenkartano, and the vicar of Kokemäki Fredrik Grönholm took the initiative to protect and preserve the preaching house as a national monument. Turku Cathedral Chapter undertook the task of managing it, and funds were collected by subscription in the country's parishes. The Senate also granted an appropriation for building a protective structure around the preaching house. The protective building, designed by architect P.J. Gylich, was completed in 1857 in time for the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in Finland.

A dendrochronological dating study was carried out on the log timbers of the preaching house in 1990. On the basis of the annual rings, the oldest dated timbers were felled in winter 1472-1473. Even so, the preaching house may be older, since not all of the building's logs were dated; the logs were probably replaced several times during the upkeep of the storehouse, and some of the dated timbers also came from the 16th and 17th centuries. The centuries-old folk tradition may also relate to an older building that stood on the same site.

The Kokemäenjoki valley was densely settled in the area around the Teljä trading post. Next to the trading post was, among others, the village of Ylistaro, which had 18 farms in the 1560s. The Kravi canal, planned and partly built in the last years of Swedish rule to bypass the rapids at Kokemäki, would, if completed, have ended near the Teljä trading post.