Lake in Finland Formed Like Finland Itself?

Social media accounts and web sites devoted to quirky journey content material usually share a picture of a small physique of water — Lake Neitokainen — that seems to be formed identical to the nation by which it resides: Finland.

Whereas use of the phrase “lake” could also be a stretch, there may be certainly a human-made physique of water in a desolate and sparsely inhabited a part of northern Finland that was designed to be a 1:10,000 mannequin of Finland itself.

Extra precisely described as a pond, Lake Neitokainen was to be the centerpiece of a vacationer village that was by no means constructed. It may be considered on Google Maps:

Within the late Nineteen Eighties, a booming financial system and curiosity in arctic tourism and snowboarding led the corporate Polartrio to develop land within the Lappland area of Finland — an space effectively above the Arctic circle. As reported by the Finnish outlet Veikkaus in 2015, Polartrio had plans to construct a lodge and dozens of vacation cabins for skiers and vacationers.

The first development supervisor for the mission, Esko Sääskilahti, described the method behind modifying an current pond within the space, noting that the entire mission took solely per week to finish (Translated by Google):

On his free evenings, [Sääskilahti] regarded on the web site plans of the vacation village and considered what might be achieved with the deliberate pond in the midst of the village. Sääskilahti started to stretch it right into a lake. …

When Polartrio lastly accepted Sääskilahti’s Suomi plan, per week was given to construct the lake. Sääskilahti drew a line from Porvoo to Nuorgam and calculated a ratio of 1 to 10 thousand as the suitable measurement for the lake.

All you wanted to stipulate the pool was a tape measure, a prism and some sticks. The lake was inbuilt per week with two excavators and the assistance of some males in late summer time 1991. It grew to become 116 meters lengthy and one meter deep.

By 1991, Finland’s financial system had plunged right into a full-blown depression, decimating the vacationer trade and the demand for Arctic resorts. The world surrounding the lake was, starting in 1991, inhabited by a gaggle of European-descended, self-described Indians who belonged to a faux-naturalist motion often known as the Iriadamant.

The group was deported in 1993, and the land — apart from the pond-turned-lake — remained undeveloped on the time of this reporting. “Typically the floods stretched the borders slightly in direction of Russia and Sweden. But it surely appears to be like like it would keep there,” Sääskilahti told Veikkaus in 2015.

As a result of photographs present an precise physique of water in Finland that matches the political borders of Finland, and since its existence and story has been well-documented, we price the declare as “True.”

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