Socks (parish)

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Socken ( Swedish ) is the name of a parish in Sweden and Finland and thus the smallest territorial ecclesiastical unit.

The church was divided into parishes in the 12th and 13th centuries and is based in part on older, pre-Christian territorial units. The parishes took on non-ecclesiastical administrative tasks as early as the Middle Ages , which were expanded in the 17th century. The decision-making body was the community assembly, in Swedish sockenstämma, of which the pastor was chairman . In 1843 civil and ecclesiastical administration was separated, with a parish council (sockenstämma) dealing with civil affairs and a church council (kyrkoråd) dealing with ecclesiastical affairs. In the community reform of 1862 this separation was finally consolidated by transferring the civil administration to the newly formed rural community (landskommun) , while the church community ( församling ) was formed for the church administration . In the municipal reform of 1952, this division was finally abolished. In today's administrative language, församling is now usually used as a name for the parish, but the word socken has been preserved to denote the old territorial units.

Finland , which had been part of Sweden since the 12th century, initially retained the Swedish administrative system, even after it became a grand duchy under Russian rule in 1809 . In Finnish the parishes were known as pitäjä . It was not until an administrative reform in 1865 that the municipal administration was separated from the church administration and the political community (kunta) was introduced as a civil self-government unit.

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