Kastelli Giant’s Church

Why this is extraordinary

Jätinkirkko, a giant’s church, is the later Finnish name for a kind of stone enclosure found only on the old Bothnian coast, between Yli-Ii and Närpiö. A measuring paper counts 40 to 50 of them, depending on the definition, which is unsettled because the use is unsettled. They are often rectangles. The long axis runs from about 12 metres to about 60. The walls are low, about half a metre up to about 2. Kastelli at Pattijoki in Raahe is the large one. The same paper’s table gives it 62 by 36 metres. Most have gates, which are lowerings in the wall you can walk through. Some have cairns built into the wall or just outside it, called sacristies in that study, a word borrowed from churches and not a claim that a liturgy survived.

The clock is the sea, leaving. After the ice, the land here is still springing back. A structure built on the shore, or on an island, is now as much as 30 kilometres inland. Date the height of the ancient shoreline, and you date the century when that spot was coast. The measuring paper places the enclosures in 2500 to 2000 BC and says they concentrate on that old shore. A dissertation on the same stone structures dates them by shoreline chronology alone, and it ties the giant’s churches to a middle Neolithic cairn tradition around 3000 to 2500 BC. Those brackets touch. They are not one sentence. Neither is a charcoal sample from under a named stone at Kastelli.

What they were for has been argued for more than a hundred years. The list in the measuring paper is dwellings, burials, temples, fortresses, natural ridges, stores for seal meat, and hunting enclosures. The smallest might have been lived in. The largest would have been awkward houses. No ordinary traces of permanent living have been found inside. The photographs show why a fortress reading is hard to press. The bank is broad and low. It would not stop a determined person. It would break the wind, and it would hide a hunter, and it would mark a place.

The sky reading measures 23 enclosures. You take the long axis, and you take each gate as seen from the centre. At the latitude of Raahe the sun at midwinter rises far to the south and barely clears the horizon, and at midsummer it almost does not set, so a line toward true south and a line toward the winter-solstice sunrise can be the same line within the error of a ruined wall. The original horizon to the west was the sea, flat, and the eastern horizon was often flat too, because the enclosures sat on the highest point of a former island. Trees, if the island was already wooded, would have lifted that horizon by an unknown amount. Within plus or minus 5 degrees, about half of the 23 long axes hit a solar event, and 29 of 58 gate and cairn bearings do too. Within plus or minus 1 degree, 19 bearings still hit. Of the 29 solar hits at the wider tolerance, 6 are the winter solstice, 4 the summer solstice, 3 an equinox, and 16 the mid-quarter days the paper identifies with Vappu, the May festival, and Kekri, a November festival of the dead older than the historical record. Those festival names are later Finnish tradition. They are not a Neolithic text.

Kastelli’s own numbers are in the table. The long axis is 13 degrees, read as summer-solstice sunrise. One gate at 103 degrees, with a horizon height of 1 degree, is read as an equinox sunrise 12 degrees off, and the caption of a figure says that bearing, seen from the centre, is the sunrise 11 days before the spring equinox, which the paper suggests might have served a count of the solar year by lunar months. Another gate at 193 degrees is 4 degrees from winter-solstice sunset. The paper’s own caution is worth keeping. Plus or minus 5 degrees is 36 percent of the horizon at Raahe, so a hit inside that window is easier than it sounds. Preservation moves the centre you measure from. And the authors say it is too early to call the enclosures primarily cult places. A solar bearing may have been a fashion in building, not a new religion. Grain is known from Puolanka by 2200 BC, about 70 kilometres from the nearest of these sites, so farmers and coastal hunters were within reach of each other. A calendar could have travelled. A wall can also face the sun because the sun is where the weather is.