Saami buildings on Lake Suolajarvi

View of a Saami hut and outhouses at Jurma, a settlement beside Lake Suolajarvi.

Photographer: Arthur John Evans
Date of photograph: 31 August to 1 September 1873
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Finland
Region/Place: Lapland; Lake Suolajarvi; Jurma
Cultural group: European Saami
Format: Black and white print (mounted on card)
Size: 74 x 99 mm; 174 x 245 mm (with mount)
Acquisition: Joan Evans. Donated August 1941

***

Primary documentation: ‘[p.588] Dr. JOAN EVANS, from the property of the late SIR ARTHUR EVANS, Youlbury, Boars Hill, Oxford. [List of items follows]’; ‘[p.590] 13 photographs mounted on cards. Types & scenery in Lappland. Finland, Sweden. Taken on journey in 1873’: Pitt Rivers Museum accession records (Donations X, 1937–1941), pp.588, 590. Annotations on mount: ‘Lapp house (to l.) & out-houses (to R.)/ JURMA on Lake SUOLAJÄYRI'/ Enare Lappmark’ (written on mount in brown ink).

Research notes: It has been established by Philip Grover that this photograph was taken by Arthur Evans on 31 August or 1 September 1873, when his travelling party was at Jurma, a settlement beside Lake Suolajarvi. Evans wrote in his journal of the voyage to Finnish Lapland: ‘The mountains were not steep - but here & there we got some fine views, & saw bits of precipitous rock & at last caught sight of a lake as large & lovelier than Hammasjärvi [Hammasjarvi], called Suolajäyrvi [Suolajarvi] on whose banks we found the hut & outhouses for which we were bound’ (entry dated 31 August 1873): Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans Archive, B/2/1, Box 1, Notebook 2, p.52. For more information on Arthur Evans’ voyage to Finnish Lapland in 1873, see Joan Evans, Time and Chance: The Story of Arthur Evans and His Forebears (London, 1943), pp.172–176; Ann Brown, Before Knossos...: Arthur Evans’s Travels in the Balkans and Crete (Oxford, 1993), pp.14–16, 90; and Tony Lurcock, No Particular Hurry: British Travellers in Finland, 1830-1917 (London, 2013), pp.123–134, 250.