Sweden pressured to return Finnish skulls taken for racial studies | Yle Uutiset
The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture is preparing an official request for the repatriation of human remains that were removed from abandoned cemeteries in Finland almost 150 years ago and sent to Sweden for racial studies.
Most of the human remains, mainly skulls, which are still in the collection of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet, were retrieved from the cemetery of a destroyed church in Pälkäne in Finland’s Pirkanmaa region in 1873. Some of the remains are from graves in the cemeteries of parish churches in Eno, Pielavesi. and Rautalampi.
In 2019, Karolinska Institutet issued an apology for moving from Finland, but has not returned the remains despite many requests from organizations and individuals.
Joni Hiitola, Senior Council of Ministers at the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, told Swedish public radio last weekend that the remains will be re-excavated where they were excavated. If the cemetery where they were retrieved is no longer used, the funerals will be buried in the current cemeteries in the parishes from which they were taken.
MP Pauli Kiuru (NCP), which has put a formal written question to the government on the issue, says that return will be investigated again this fall.
Efforts to convince Karolinska Institutet to return the remains, including those from Pälkäne parish, have been stopped for several years.