Värikallio

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The cliff stands away from any road, on the far eastern arm of a lake that empties at last toward the Russian border. To reach it a walker crosses water and forest; the face of stone rises sheer from the shore of Lake Somerjärvi, and only when the canoe or the duckboard path draws close does the rock resolve into figures — a faint company of red shapes strung along the gray granite, a little above the line where the water meets the wall. They were set there in the Stone Age, and for most of the centuries since, no one with a name in any record had seen them. Two skiers came upon the painted cliff in 1977. That late finding is the first thing to know about Värikallio: the most northerly of the great painted faces of Finland, hidden so deep in the forest of Hossa that the modern world reached it within living memory.

The cliff on Lake Somerjärvi

Värikallio — the name means, plainly, the “color cliff” or “paint cliff” — lies on the north shore of the easternmost reach of Lake Somerjärvi, in the Hossa country of the parish of Suomussalmi, in the province of Kainuu. This is the deep northeast of Finland, a landscape of pine forest, glacial ridges, and water so clear it carries a particular reputation among the lakes of the country. The border with Russia runs not far to the east. Today the cliff lies inside Hossa National Park, the park established in 2017 to mark the centenary of Finnish independence; the rock-paintings are its oldest and most renowned feature, reached by a marked trail and a duckboard span that carries the visitor out over the water to stand beneath the figures.

The paintings themselves were made on a steep granite wall in the manner of all the rock-art of this northern world. The colorant was ochre — red and yellow earth, iron-bearing clay heated to brighten the color, bound with some medium of blood, fat, or egg, and applied to the rock with the hand or some simple tool. The result is the brownish-red that has held to the stone for thousands of years, fading but never wholly gone. The dating is given by style rather than by any layer of soil: by comparison with the wider body of Finnish rock-painting, the Värikallio figures are placed at the end of the Stone Age and the threshold of the Early Metal Period, across roughly the centuries from 2500 to 1500 BCE — between the late Comb Ceramic phase and what came after. In round terms the figures are some three and a half to four and a half thousand years old. The makers belonged to the hunting and fishing peoples of the eastern forest, the same broad world that produced the painted cliffs to the south; the Comb Ceramic culture that flourished in this region between roughly 5000 and 2000 BCE is generally credited with the rock-art tradition into which Värikallio falls.

What survives is a count, not a guess: sixty-one separate figures have been identified on the face of the wall, more than have been read at most Finnish sites, and enough to place Värikallio among the largest of the country’s painted cliffs. (Some accounts call it the third-largest such site; the more cautious sources say only “among the largest,” and on the evidence to hand that is the safer claim.) The figures are not scattered at random. They run along the rock in rows and clusters, a gathered company set out above the water — humans and animals together, arranged as if in scene or procession, the whole reading less like a gallery of single images than like one crowded event held on the stone.

The gathered company on the stone

What is painted at Värikallio is, first, the world of the hunt. The most numerous figures are animals, and chief among them the elk — the great deer of the northern forest that was the central game of these peoples, the meat and hide and bone on which the whole life of the forest hunter turned. The Värikallio elk are rendered in a small, stick-like form that is, by the reckoning of those who study the site, not quite matched anywhere else: a local hand, a local manner. To the elk the cliff adds what may be the single most unusual animal in all of Finnish rock-art — a figure that has been read as a bear, possibly the only bear anywhere in the painted cliffs of Finland. The bear was the most charged of all animals to the peoples of the northern forest, the beast hedged about with name-avoidance and ceremony, killed and then honored in the great feast that the Finns called the peijaiset and sent back, in the understanding of the hunters, to the sky from which it had come. To find it once, and perhaps only once, on a painted wall is to find the holiest game set among the rest.

Then there are the people. Värikallio carries rows of human figures, many of them marked by a feature that gives the site much of its strangeness: small triangular heads, or triangular bodies, the human form reduced to a few sharp planes. This triangular manner is rare — recorded at only a couple of other Finnish sites — and one figure in particular, a human shape with a triangular head in which eye and nose are picked out, is described by those who have studied the cliff as without parallel. The human figures stand in lines and groups, and the impression of procession or rite is strong enough that the scenes are routinely described as depicting hunting and what the site’s own interpreters call shamanic ritual.

It is here that the most-discussed figure of all appears: a human form crowned with horns or antlers. The reading of this figure is where the careful line between what is seen and what is surmised must be drawn. What is on the rock is a person with projections from the head. What that means is interpretation, and it is contested. The dominant reading — the one carried in the site’s own signage and in much of the literature — takes the antlered or horned human as a shaman or a spirit-being: the antlers as the headpiece of a ritual specialist, on the analogy of the antlered or horned headgear documented, far later, among the arctic hunting peoples; the horns and ears also read as a sign that the wearer belonged to the elk’s own kin, half-human and half-animal, a figure standing on the boundary the hunter’s religion was most concerned to cross. In that reading Värikallio shows the trance-religion of the northern hunters made visible — the specialist who could move between the world of men and the world of the game-giving powers. This is the interpretation that has made the cliff a touchstone in the larger argument that Finnish rock-art is the record of a Sámi or proto-Sámi cosmological landscape, a stone face read as a map of the shaman’s cosmos.

The hedge belongs in the same breath as the claim. No text accompanies these figures; no maker explains them; the “shaman” is an inference, drawn from the figure’s form and from much later ethnography, and the very label shaman(?) — with its question mark — is how the site’s own documentation marks the uncertainty. The antlered human may be a ritual specialist, or a spirit, or a hunter in a disguise, or a thing the modern eye has no name for. What can be said without strain is narrower and stranger: that on this wall, among the elk and the rare bear, the people of the Stone Age set a human figure that is not simply human, and set it where the rest of the company could be seen to stand around it.

One absence completes the picture. The painted cliffs to the south are full of boats — long crescents crowded with crew, among the most common of all Finnish rock-art motifs. At Värikallio there are none. The cliff that gives the forest its elk, its bear, and its horned man withholds the boat entirely, and the silence is itself part of the site’s distinctness: a wilderness assembly of the hunt and its powers, with the water present everywhere as the place the figures stand above, and nowhere as a thing to be crossed.

The sacred face of stone

To understand why the figures are here at all is to understand the kind of holy place a painted cliff was. The peoples of this world built no temple. Their sacred architecture was the land itself — the offering-island, the spirit-stone, the painted wall — and the rock-paintings were set, with great consistency, on steep faces of granite directly above water: a cliff that drops sheer to a lake, the figures placed just above the waterline, often where the rock leans or overhangs. The choice is not casual. A face of this kind is a threshold, the meeting of stone and water, of the world above and the world the water was felt to hold; and the surface itself, smooth and red-veined and rising clean from the lake, was a thing already charged before any hand touched it. The painters did not consecrate an empty site by building on it. They marked a place that was understood to be a place of power, and the marking was a way of answering what the rock already was. The holy here is found in the form of the land, not raised against it. The pattern is consistent across the whole body of Finnish rock art, where the figures are painted, almost without exception, onto steep faces overlooking water.

Within that pattern Värikallio is the wilderness instance — the painted cliff of the deep forest, far from the more settled waterways of the south, set above a remote lake in a country of pine and clear water. The remoteness is not incidental to its meaning; it is bound up with it. The forest peoples held that the wild itself was the domain of powers — the lord of the forest who owned the game, the spirits of water and stone — and a cliff like this, hard to reach and standing over its lake in silence, was the kind of place where that ownership could be acknowledged and addressed. The figures gathered on the stone read, in this light, as the hunt brought into the presence of the powers that gave it: the elk that must be granted, the bear that must be honored, the specialist who could ask. The same scholarship that reads the antlered figure as a shaman reads the whole cliff as a station in a sacred geography, a place chosen because the land had already made it sacred.

The relation to the great painted cliff of the south, Astuvansalmi on Lake Saimaa, is one of kinship rather than identity. Both are sacred faces of granite above still water, both crowded with elk and human figures, both belonging to the same broad tradition of the eastern forest. But Astuvansalmi is the southern monument — older, set on the great lake-system, famous for its bow-bearing figures and for the human shape long read as a “Mistress” of the waters, attended by amber and other offerings recovered from the lake below. Värikallio is the northern one, later in date, set in the Hossa wilderness, distinguished by its triangular-headed people, its stick-like elk, its lone possible bear, its horned man, and its silence where the boats should be. They are two faces of the same religion of the rock, kept in two corners of the same forest world.

Recovery in the forest

The modern history of Värikallio begins, in effect, in 1977, when two skiers crossing the frozen wilderness of Hossa came upon the painted cliff. That the largest painted face of Finland’s far northeast should have waited until the last quarter of the twentieth century to enter the record is a measure of how thoroughly the forest had kept it. The same remoteness that hid the site is the reason there is so much to find: undisturbed, unweathered by traffic, unquarried, the figures held to the rock through the centuries precisely because no settled world pressed against them. What preserved Värikallio was what concealed it.

The figures took their place, on discovery, within the field of Finnish rock-art study that had grown up around the better-known southern cliffs — the long work of recording the painted faces of the lakes, counting and tracing their figures, arguing over their age and their meaning. By that count Värikallio is one of the country’s richest sites, the most northerly of the major cliffs and among the largest by figure-count, with a local repertoire — the triangular heads, the particular elk, the bear, the antlered human — that has kept it central to the larger debates: over how the rock-art should be dated, over whether and how it can be read as the record of a hunter’s trance-religion, and over the long argument that the painted cliffs of Finland trace a Sámi or pre-Sámi sacred landscape across the north. The most recent scholarship has returned to Värikallio precisely to read it as such a cosmological landscape, the stone face approached as a map of the shaman’s cosmos rather than a gallery of pictures.

The protective frame today is Hossa National Park, within which the cliff and its figures are conserved as the region’s foremost monument. The duckboard path that carries the visitor out over Lake Somerjärvi to stand beneath the rows of red figures is itself a kind of statement about the site’s standing: not a museum object brought indoors, but a sacred face of the prehistoric north kept in the forest and the water that made it. The horned human and the rare bear, the procession of triangular people and the small elk of the hunt, hold to the granite where they were set some three to four thousand years ago — a Stone-Age cult-place of the deep forest, found late, and standing still in the wilderness that preserved it.

The Stone-Age painted cliff of Värikallio rising from the shore of Lake Somerjärvi in Hossa, Suomussalmi. Photograph by Ilari Aalto (Ilarius), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

A human figure crowned with horns or antlers among the Värikallio paintings, read by many interpreters as a shaman or spirit-being — though the site’s own documentation marks the reading with a question. Photograph by Ilari Aalto (Ilarius), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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