Ukonsaari

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A rock rises out of the water about eleven kilometers northeast of the village of Inari, near the middle of one of the great lakes of the European far north. It is not large — some thirty meters high, fifty broad, a hundred long — but it stands apart, steep-sided and bare, from the low forested shores around it, and in the open reach of water called Ukonselka it is the one thing the eye fixes on. To reach it one takes a boat. There is no causeway, no bridge, no path from the land; the island keeps the lake between itself and everyone who would come to it. That separation is the first fact about the place, and in a sense it is the whole of it. The Inari Sami did not build a sanctuary on this rock. The rock was the sanctuary, set apart by the water as the holy is set apart from the common, and across that water, for as long as anyone can trace, the people came to make their offerings.

The island and its names

In Finnish the island is Ukonsaari, “Ukko’s island,” or Ukonkivi, “Ukko’s stone,” after Ukko, the old man of the sky whose name belongs to the thunder. In the Inari Sami language — Aanaar, the eastern Sami tongue spoken around this lake — it is Aijih, sometimes written Aijah, with the fuller forms Aijihsualui, “Aijih’s island,” and Aijihkeegi, “Aijih’s stone.” The word aijih means the old man, the grandfather, and it is the primary Inari Sami name for the thunder-power, the figure who in the Finnish world is Ukko and who across the wider Sami lands appears under names such as Horagalles and Diermes. The island and the god share the one name. To say Aijih is to name both the holy old man of the sky and the rock in the lake that is his.

Lake Inari itself is the third-largest lake in Finland and the largest in Sapmi, the Sami homeland; the Encyclopaedia Britannica gives it an area of roughly 1,100 square kilometers and more than three thousand islands, fed by the Ivalo River and drained northward by the Paatsjoki toward the Arctic Ocean. Among that scatter of islands two are remembered above the rest: Hautuumaasaari, the graveyard island where the old Sami buried their dead, and this one, Ukonkivi, the offering-place. The lake belongs to a people whose life was shaped by it. The Inari Sami, unlike many of their kin to the north and west, were not in the main large-scale reindeer herders; theirs was a culture of fishing and hunting, of the lake and the forest, and the Inari Sami today number only some hundreds of speakers of their language, a small nation holding to a small territory. The sacred geography of such a people is a geography of water and stone. The holy is where the lake has put a rock that stands alone.

The sieidi and the offering across the water

A sieidi — in Inari Sami siejdi, in Finnish seita — is a sacred place in the Sami sense: a stone, a rock formation, sometimes a tree or a cliff or a spring, that stands out from the land around it and that is held to be, or to house, a power. It is not made; it is recognized. The sieidi is found where nature has already set something apart, and it is honored where it stands, with offerings laid before it or upon it or in it, for the things the people need from the powers — the catch of fish, the increase of the game, success in the hunt. Most sieidis are single stones at a good fishing-place along a shore. Ukonsaari is a sieidi raised to a different scale. Here the sacred object is not a boulder but a whole island, the grandest of its kind in the Inari country and the most famous Sami holy place in Finland, an altar reached only by crossing the lake.

What was done there can be described from the record, though it is described at the distance the record allows. On the island is a cleft in the rock, a small cave, and it was here that the offerings were deposited. The thunder-power Aijih had his cult on this island, and the offerings made to him — reindeer antlers and objects of metal — were still being laid in the cleft in the late nineteenth century, within living memory of those who recorded them. For a fishing people, the prayers carried across the water were for the lake’s yield first of all; the sieidi at a fishing-ground was the place where one asked the spirit of the place for the fish, and Ukonsaari was the great sieidi of the whole lake, the island-altar of the sky-power who governs the weather over the water. The antlers in the cleft are the trace of the reindeer given; the metal is the trace of a wealth offered. What the offering meant to the one who made it — the exact understanding of the exchange between the people and the old man of the sky — is held within the tradition and cannot be reconstructed as a procedure. The sources show the deposit, not the inner sense of the rite, and the honest account stops where the record stops.

It helps to set the island within the ordinary fabric of Inari Sami sacred life, because Ukonsaari is the extraordinary case of a common kind. Along the shores of the lake and at the mouths of its bays there stood other, smaller sieidis — stones, and in some places wooden figures roughly shaped to a human form — set at the good fishing-grounds, where a share of the catch or of fat or bone might be given to secure the next haul. The island differs from these not in kind but in degree. Where a shore-stone served one fishing-place and the household that fished it, Ukonsaari stood for the whole of the great lake and the people of its district together; it was the communal altar of a scattered population, the one sieidi worth a long row out across open water. The grandeur of the offering matched the grandeur of the site. A handful of bones at a shore-stone is a private exchange; reindeer antlers and worked silver carried out to the island in the middle of the lake are something nearer a public act, the gift of a community to the power that ruled the weather over all their water.

The reconstruction of “Sami religion” as a system is itself a contested undertaking, and it is worth marking the difficulty plainly. What survives is fragmentary and much of it was written down by outsiders — clergy, travelers, antiquarians — whose interest was often hostile and whose categories were not the Sami’s own. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century missionary campaigns in the Sami lands seized and burned the noaidi drums, the painted instruments by which the Sami shaman entered the spirit world; the persecution of the noaidi and the long pressure of forced Christianization are part of the history of every Sami sacred site, and they mean that the surviving picture comes filtered through the very effort to destroy it. What can be said with confidence about Ukonsaari is what the place itself preserves and what the deposits in its cleft record. The rest — the full shape of the cult, the words said, the figure of Aijih in the mind of the worshiper — is approached carefully, hedged where it must be hedged, never filled in to make a tidier story.

Ukonkivi (Ukonsaari) in Lake Inari, Finnish Lapland — the steep, isolated offering-island of the Inari Sami. Photograph by Trogain, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

What the cleft held

The antiquity of the offering-place is not a matter of inference alone. The first written record of the sacrificial cave appears to date from the early nineteenth century, when Jacob Fellman, a minister and a noted authority on Lapland, found the cave with a great heap of reindeer antlers piled by its mouth. Then, in 1873, the place received a visitor whose later fame would have nothing to do with the Arctic. Arthur Evans — the British archaeologist who, decades afterward, would uncover the palace of Knossos on Crete and give the Minoan civilization its name — was in Lapland that September, traveling and collecting. The Cabinet collection at the University of Oxford holds a pencil drawing of the small island that Evans made on 2 September 1873, and among the Sami objects he gathered on the same journey is a reindeer-antler spoon carved with zigzag ornament, picked up near Lake Inari days later. On the island, in the cleft, Evans found a deposit, and in it a fragment of silver ornament — a piece of worked jewelry, a filigree head-ornament of medieval date, generally placed in roughly the eleventh to thirteenth century and now in the collection of the Sami museum Siida at Inari.

That silver is the hard evidence of the offering-place’s age. It says that the cleft was receiving deposits of value many centuries before the antlers that lay there in Evans’s own day, that the island was already a place where wealth was given across the water in the high Middle Ages. Later work has added to the picture: radiocarbon dating of bone from the offering deposits has returned dates running through the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, and in 2007 Finnish archaeologists identified a second sieidi on the island, so that the rock carries not one sacred point but at least two. The dates do not all line up into a single tidy sequence, and they should not be forced to. What they establish together is duration: the use of Ukonsaari as an offering-place reaches back through the medieval centuries and continues, in the antler-offerings, into the threshold of modern memory. Few sacred sites of this northern world can be anchored so firmly, and it was an accident of history — a young Englishman with an antiquarian’s eye, in the lake country a quarter-century before Crete — that fixed one end of the chain.

The holy that is found, not built

Set Ukonsaari beside the other great sacred places of this far-northern world and a single principle comes clear. There are no temples here. The painted cliffs at Astuvansalmi and Varikallio, the seita-stone of Taatsi, the offering-island of Inari — none is a structure raised by human hands to house a god. Each is a place the land itself had already set apart, and that the people recognized as holy because it stood out: a rock-face above still water, a stone standing alone by a fell-side lake, an island steep and separate in the middle of a great water. The sacred in this tradition is not constructed but discovered. Where the Mediterranean and the south built sanctuaries to mark the divine, the peoples of the northern forest and tundra read the divine off the surface of a landscape that had marked it for them. Ukonsaari is perhaps the clearest case of all, because here the thing set apart is at its largest and its separation at its plainest — an island, with the lake itself standing as the wall between the holy and the everyday. The boat is the only door, and the crossing is part of the act.

This is a feature of the religion of the Sami and of the wider Finnic and Uralic world rather than a peculiarity of one island. The same sensibility runs through the cult of the sky-power across these lands: Ukko the Finnish thunderer whose name the Finnish island-name carries, Beaivi the sun whom the Sami greet, the spirits of forest and water who own the game and the fish — all are met in the open landscape, at the stone or the cliff or the shore or the island, not behind a built wall. To compare Aijih and Ukko with the thunder-gods of the Indo-European peoples — with a Thor or a Perkunas — is tempting and not wholly empty, but it can mislead. These are Uralic peoples, not Indo-European; the resemblance of one sky-thunderer to another is a thing to be noted and held at arm’s length, not pressed into an identity. Aijih is the old man of this lake and this sky, and the island that bears his name is his and no other’s.

Reception and continuing significance

Ukonsaari comes down to the present along three channels, and they should be kept distinct. The first is the Sami oral tradition and the place-name itself, the living knowledge that this island is Aijih’s and that what was done at it was sacred — the channel along which the Inari Sami have always known the place, independent of any outside record. The second is the written and material documentation: Fellman’s note of the antler-heap, Evans’s drawing and the silver from the cleft, the antiquarian and ethnographic accounts of the nineteenth century, the radiocarbon dates and the survey work of the twentieth and twenty-first. The third is the modern standing of the island as heritage — its place among the best-known Sami sacred sites in Finland, its inclusion on the country’s tentative list for World Heritage recognition as part of a grouping of old Sami sacred sites at Inari.

That heritage standing carries an obligation, and in recent years it has been acted on. For some years tour operators ran cruises and excursions out to the island, and visitors landing on it behaved as visitors to a viewpoint rather than to a sanctuary — wandering off the paths, picnicking, leaving litter, treating the rock as scenery. In late 2019 the local tour operator Visit Inari announced that it would no longer make landings on Ukonsaari, after discussion with the Sami community and archaeologists who had long argued that the island should not be tramped over; the decision, reported widely, came without any formal ban, as a matter of respect freely chosen. Boats may pass; the rock may be seen across the water as it has always been seen. But the cleft and the island are left to themselves. The gesture restores, in a small modern way, the old condition of the place — the holy kept at the far side of a crossing, approached only with the seriousness the crossing demands.

What is honored in that restraint is not a museum and not a ruin. The Sami are a living people, and the religion whose great altar this island was is not a dead paganism but a heritage still owned, still meaningful, still capable of asking that its sacred places be treated as sacred. The antlers that once filled the cleft are gone, and the silver is in a museum case at Siida a few kilometers down the shore. The island is unchanged. It rises from the water as it did when the first offering was carried out to it, steep and apart, the lake around it doing the work that elsewhere a temple wall would do — marking off the ground of the old man of the sky from the ground where the rest of life is lived.

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