User:KaGr/Pojo, Finland

For information about the former municipality see Pohja, Finland former municipality

Pojo Swedish, 'Pohja', is a town in the region of Western Uusimaa, Finland. Pojo is since 2009 a quarter in the city of Raseborg, Finland and also the centre within this area.

Settling
The Pojo-area has been inhabited since the 4000 Bc From ancient times, spearheads and club stones have been found. From the 2000s Bc nine boat axes and five other axes have been found. From the time around the birth of Christ, iron axes, saws and hake graves have been found. After the Crusades in the 12th century, the coastal areas of southern Finland were colonised by Swedish settlers, and Swedish-speaking villages arose, for example, along Pojo Bay, as the water was the natural shipping route in the past. The coastal areas had then been relatively deserted for a long time. Even today, Pojo is a district with a significant proportion of Swedish-speaking population.

Oldest documentations
Pojo (old script: Poyæ) is first mentioned in a document from 1335,[5] but the area is said to have been called Skawastadhe (later, among other things, Skavistad) in a writing from 1326[6]. However, Pojo's history goes back much further.

Trade routs and energy
The Pojo Bay was already a trade route to the inner part of Finland in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The waterway connected to an important country road, the historic King's Road, which runs here in a west-easterly direction. The northern region is rich in high ridges with dozens of lakes in between, there are waterways and rapids. Pojos favourable location next to these rapids and waterways contributed to it becoming the cradle of the Finnish iron industry. In the 17th century, five ironworks were built around the rapids of Western Uusimaa, three of them in Pohja: Antskog around 1630, Billnäs in 1639 and Fiskars in 1649.

Parish
In the 20th century, Pojo parish was divided into a Finnish and a Swedish parish on the basis of language. In 2015 the Finnish speaking parishes within the city of Raseborg formed Raaseporin suomalainen seurakunta and together with the Swedish speaking parish in Karis a new Karis-Pojo svenska församling was established.

