Imatra

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Imatran kaupunki
coat of arms map
Imatra.vaakuna.svg Imatra.sijainti.suomi.2008.svg
Basic data
State : FinlandFinland Finland
Landscape : South Karelia
Administrative community : Imatra
Geographical location 61 ° 10 ′  N , 28 ° 46 ′  E Coordinates: 61 ° 10 ′  N , 28 ° 46 ′  E
Surface: 191.25 km²
of which land area: 154.96 km²
of which inland waterways: 36.29 km²
Residents : 26,932 (Dec. 31, 2018)
Population density : 173.8 inhabitants / km²
Municipality number : 153
Postcodes : 55100-55910
Language (s) : Finnish
Website : www.imatra.fi

Imatra [ ˈimɑtrɑ ] is a city in south-eastern Finland with 26,932 inhabitants (as of December 31, 2018). The border and industrial city is a famous travel destination thanks to the Imatrafall ( Imatrankoski in Finnish ).

geography

Position and extent

Imatra is located in the southeastern Finnish landscape of South Karelia on the border with Russia . In Imatra, the Vuoksi River breaks through the Salpausselkä mountain range, which borders the Finnish Lake District in the south and east. In the west Imatra has a share in Lake Saimaa , in the north of the urban area is Lake Immalanjärvi .

Neighboring municipalities and cities of Imatra are Ruokolahti in the north, Lappeenranta in the southwest and, on the Russian side, Swetogorsk in the southeast. Relations with Svetogorsk, only seven kilometers away, were strengthened after the fall of the Soviet Union, so that the two places now call themselves twin cities . The next larger city on the Finnish side is Lappeenranta 37 km southwest. The distance to the capital Helsinki is 257 km, to Saint Petersburg it is 210 km.

City structure

Imatra does not actually have a city center, but consists of three places that have grown together: Mansikkala, Imatrankoski and Vuoksenniska. The administrative center of Imatra is the Mansikkala district, which was newly built in the 1960s and has 4100 inhabitants. Landmarks of the district are the 13-storey high-rise buildings in its center, also known as the “ Manhattan of Imatra”. All of Imatra's important public buildings can be found in Mansikkala. The commercial center of the city, on the other hand, is the Imatrankoski district, located directly on Imatrafall. 4,000 people live in Imatrankoski, the center of the district is densely built, with private homes predominating on the outskirts. The construction of the new Vuoksenranta residential area is an attempt to bring Mansikkala and Imatrankoski closer together. The third center of Imatra is Vuoksenniska, which was built around the factories of the Stora Enso group. Vuoksenniska has 2500 inhabitants, most of whom live in terraced houses or in their own homes.

Originally the place Tainionkoski was one of the centers of Imatra. With the establishment of Mansikkala and the relocation of the factories, this district around the old works of the Tornator Group, in which 1500 people now live, sank to a purely suburb. Other districts are Karhumäki, Meltola and Rajapatsas. The villages Huhtasenkylä, Itä-Siitola, Jäppilänniemi-Salopeltola, Korvenranta, Lempukka, Niskalampi, Rautio and Salo-Isakka are located in the more rural area on the outskirts of the urban area.

history

The name Imatra originally only stood for the Imatrafall. The Finnish national epic Kalevala says: Ei ole Vuoksen voittanutta, / yli käynyttä Imatran (“Vuoksi has not yet been conquered / Imatra not exceeded”). The etymology of the name is unclear; this hydronym may come from an unknown substrate language from the time before Finland was settled by Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples. A connection to the Tungus language imandra , "snow", is not excluded.

The first human settlement reached today's urban area of ​​Imatra between 4000 and 3000 BC. When the Vuoksi River broke through, the water level of Lake Saimaa began to drop. The first sedentary settlement did not emerge until the 15th or 16th century. In the Treaty of Nöteborg , Imatra came to Sweden with western Karelia , which had previously been under the influence of Novgorod . The oldest written mention of Imatra comes from a tax list from 1541, which records the taxation of salmon fishermen on the Vuoksi. Imatra came to Russia in 1743 through the Swedish cession in the Peace of Åbo . Together with the rest of the Old Finland , it was added to the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812 and thus became part of independent Finland in 1917.

State Hotel of Imatra

Imatrafall is the oldest tourist attraction in Finland. Katharina had already visited the Great Imatra in 1772 . Around 1900, Imatra became a popular travel destination for the upper class of Saint Petersburg. Imatra tourism was given a further boost by the completion of the railway line to Saint Petersburg in 1892 and the completion of the luxurious, Art Nouveau state hotel ( Valtionhotelli ) in 1903. After Finnish independence, Russian tourism dried up, but increased in the 1920s Finnish vacationers to Imatra.

Industrialization began in the Imatra area around 1880 when the Tornator forest company opened a factory in Tainionkoski. In 1929, the Imatrafall was dammed to generate electricity. The hydropower plant initially had a capacity of 56 MW, in 1937 it had 125 MW and made a significant contribution not only to the industrialization of Imatra, but also to the electrification of all of southern and eastern Finland. In the period that followed, further factories for the forestry and metalworking industries were set up, such as a factory of the Enso-Gutzeit concern (today's Stora Enso ) in Kaukopää in 1935 and an ironworks in 1936.

Hitler and Mannerheim in Immola, June 4, 1942

In 1936 an airfield was opened near the settlement of Immola , which in the following years served as a base for the 4th and then the 2nd pilot regiment of the Finnish Air Force , and in the Continuation War it served as the headquarters of the 3rd pilot regiment. On the second day of the Winter War , the airfield was first targeted by a Soviet air strike. On June 4, 1942, Adolf Hitler unexpectedly arrived at the airfield on a Focke-Wulf Condor visit of several hours to Immola to congratulate Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim , the Commander in Chief of the Finnish Armed Forces , on his 75th birthday and to consult with Mannerheim and the Finnish President Risto Ryti to lead. In the course of the Continuation War, on June 16, 1944, ten days before the conclusion of the Ryti-Ribbentrop Treaty, the Kuhlmey combat unit of the German Air Force was relocated from Estonia to Immola and flew hundreds of air raids from here until they withdrew on July 23, 1944 on Soviet targets. Today the airfield is mainly used by amateur and glider pilots, but also serves as a helicopter base for the Finnish border guards . The barracks complex from the 1930s, designed in the functionalist style by the architects Aulis Blomstedt, Elsi Borg and Elis Hyvärinen, is now a listed building.

After the Second World War , the market town of Imatra was founded in 1948 from the industrial towns of Tainionkoski, Vuoksenniska and Imatrankoski. The area was detached from the districts of Ruokolahti, Joutseno and the remnants of the Jääski community that remained on the Finnish side after the assignment to the Soviet Union . In the late 1940s, Enso Gutzeit, the largest employer in the region, commissioned a far-reaching development and infrastructure plan for Imatra. The draft submitted by Alvar Aalto calculated that Imatra's population would grow to 100,000 and envisaged a new planning center and the development of seven residential towns in the vicinity. However, the plan did not materialize.

Imatra has had town charter since 1971. The population of Imatra has been steadily declining for years. Since the historic high of 36,597 inhabitants in 1980, the city has lost more than 6,000 inhabitants.

politics

City council

The strongest party in Imatra are the Social Democrats . In the city council for the current electoral term they have 19 out of 43 deputies. The second largest group is the conservative-liberal National Collection Party with twelve seats. In third place are the right-wing populist Basic Finns with five seats, ahead of the country's third people's party, the Center Party , which also has five members of the city council. The Christian Democrats are also represented in the city council with two members, as are the Green and Left Alliance with one member each.

Composition of the City Council (2017-2021)
Political party Election result 2017 Seats
Social democrats 40.6% 19th
National rally party 27.4% 12
Base fins 13.2% 06th
Center Party 08.5% 03
Left alliance 04.2% 02
Green covenant 04.1% 01
Turnout : 56.5%

Town twinning

Imatra maintains city ​​partnerships with the following six cities:

coat of arms

The Imatra coat of arms was designed by Olof Erikson in 1950. It shows three vertical silver flashes with golden tips pointing in two directions in a red shield. The coat of arms indicates the importance of the hydropower station on Imatrafall for the city.

Culture and sights

Vuoksi Dam
The church of Vuoksenniska

The raging rapids of the Vuoksi were a popular tourist destination not only for the Russian rulers in the 19th century . The current is forced into a narrow granite gorge over a length of around 500 meters. However, since 1929 the falls have been used to generate electricity and the water has been diverted. Only in the tourist season from mid-June to mid-August are the locks opened for twenty minutes once a day and the old river bed flooded. Visitors can watch the natural spectacle from an arched bridge or from a park below. To open the locks, Jean Sibelius traditionally plays the play Es boil der Strom by loudspeakers . The luxurious state hotel (Valtionhotelli) by Imatra, built in 1903 in Art Nouveau style , is also located on the river .

The church of Vuoksenniska was built in 1957-59 according to plans by Alvar Aalto and is considered to be one of the outstanding buildings of the late work of this internationally renowned architect. The building represents a departure from the strict right-angled functionalism that characterized Aalto's buildings from the prewar period, and combines expressionistic jaggedness with an organic design language. The asymmetrical church hall can accommodate a maximum of 800 people, but allows retractable partition walls to adapt to the size of the congregation and the division of club and assembly rooms. The floor plan presents itself as a three-fold repeated, partly overlapping shell shape; The finely structured fan roof also takes up the structure of mussel shells. The bare forms of the supporting and roof structures with recessed ventilation shafts, the asymmetrical windows and the organ also represent the only ornamentation of the otherwise barren Protestant interior; three simple crosses replace the altarpiece.

Immediately at the state border there is a rock slab with a snake-shaped petroglyph , which is considered by some Finnish archaeologists (mentioned by name: Tapani Rostedt) as a prehistoric place of worship. According to Satu Hietala from the state geological research institute, this object is rated as a naturally created pattern, it was created about two billion years ago on the bottom of the primordial sea and received its present conspicuous shape through later scaling of the sediment body and through weathering. There are also other, but not so spectacular, patterns known in Finland.

Sports

The most important sports club Imatra is Imatran Pallo-Veikot (IPV), which four times (1977, 1978, 1986 and 1991) was able to win the Finnish championship in Pesäpallo , a Finnish variant of baseball. Today the club plays in the second division. Imatra is also home to the third-rate ice hockey club Imatran Ketterä . From 1964 to 1982 the Imatra circuit was the venue for the Finland Grand Prix of the Motorcycle World Championship.

Economy and Infrastructure

Imatra is still an industrial city today. In 2004, 38.9% of the workforce was employed in industry. By far the most important employers are the Stora Enso Group's two paper and board mills , which employ almost 3,000 people and thus account for more than a quarter of the jobs in Imatra. The second largest private employer in 2006 was the Ovako Group's steel mill . The city administration employed 1,868 people in that year, the Finnish State Railways provided 241 jobs in Imatra and the Finnish Border Guard 201 jobs.

Imatra is connected to the Finnish trunk road network with State Road 6 . The 48 km long section is currently mainly two-lane, but will be expanded to a four-lane motorway by 2010 in view of the increasing transit traffic and a significantly increased frequency of accidents . The expansion is currently the largest infrastructure project in south-eastern Finland.

Imatra is also connected to EuroVelo , the network of European international long-distance cycle routes, through the Iron Curtain Trail , which runs along the former Iron Curtain from Norway to the Black Sea.

Imatra's main train station is halfway between the districts of Mansikkala and Tainionkoski on the Karelia Railway (Karjalan rata) of the Finnish State Railways, and the freight station is around three kilometers north of it. This line was not built until after 1945, when, after Finland was ceded to the Soviet Union, the majority of the old Karelia railway from Joensuu to Wiburg also fell to the neighbor in the east, and now leads in an arc around the Saimaa lake area from Joensuu via Imatra to Kouvola . A railway line from Imatra via the Russian Antrea to Wiburg has existed since 1892, but is now only used for freight traffic.

Border and transit traffic and thus also the logistics industry are of some importance. The Pelkola border crossing was opened to general traffic in July 2002 and is now the third most frequented Finnish-Russian border after Vaalimaa ( Virolahti ) and Nuijamaa ( Lappeenranta ). In 2007, 930,000 border crossings were recorded. Only freight trains run on the railway from Imatra to Svetogorsk and further into the Russian interior; it is of particular importance for the import of Russian round timber. In a specialized timber import terminal, up to six freight trains with raw timber pre-sorted in Saint Petersburg are unloaded every day and prepared for onward transport on Finnish rails and roads.

sons and daughters of the town

Web links

Commons : Imatra  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Maanmittauslaitos (Finnish land surveying office): Suomen pinta-alat kunnittain January 1, 2010 . (PDF; 199 kB)
  2. ↑ Statistical Office Finland: Table 11ra - Key figures on population by region, 1990-2018
  3. ↑ City website: Imatra-Svetogorsk kaksoiskaupunkihanke ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (Finnish)
  4. ↑ Kalevala, 3: 181 f.
  5. ^ Angela Marcantonio, The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics . Blackwell, Oxford 2002.
  6. ↑ Finnish border guards : Immolan alueen historiaa (History of the Immola base, Finnish)
  7. ↑ Rakennettu kulttuuriympäristö: Immolan kasarmialue (Finnish Monument Register 1993)
  8. ^ Mikael Sundmann: Urban Planning in Finland after 1850 . In: Thomas Hall: Planning and Urban Growth in the Nordic Countries . Taylor & Francis, London 1991, p. 88.
  9. ↑ Kuntavaalit 2017 - result of the local elections 2017
  10. ↑ Ystävyyskaupungit. (No longer available online.) Imatran kaupunki, archived from the original on January 23, 2015 ; Retrieved January 23, 2015 (Finnish).
  11. ↑ Geologit tunnistivat heti… Finnish news program YLE, illustrated report from June 13, 2019
  12. ^ Statistics Center Finland
  13. ↑ Imatran kaupunkiesite 2007 ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (Finnish)
  14. ↑ Iron Curtain Trail - The northern part. Retrieved April 19, 2017 .
  15. ↑ Finnish border guards: Rajanylitysmäärät itärajan rajanylityspaikoilla (number of border crossings at the border crossings of the eastern border, Finnish)
  16. ↑ Jaakko Kilpeläinen and Katrine Lintukangas: Finland's Position in Transit Traffic - Is Cross-Border Zone a Viable Alternative? ( September 30, 2007 memento in the Internet Archive ) Northern Dimension Research Center of the University of Lappeenranta, Publication 13, 2005.