Nukari

• 1. Introduction

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  Nukari has yielded three Stone Age relics: a flat chisel, a hammer ax, and a polished stone. These objects mark the earliest known human presence in a village of about 350 people in the northeast of Nurmijärvi municipality, Finland. The River Vantaa flows through it, near the border with Tuusula municipality.

  Settlement probably arrived during the Stone Age, drawn by the river. It vanished in the Bronze Age. Through the Iron Age, the whole Uusimaa region served mainly as hunting ground, first for Estonians and then for Tavastians. The Swedish Crusades brought permanent inhabitants back.

  National road 45, connecting Helsinki, Tuusula, and Hyvinkää, runs beside Nukari today. The same road once required full-time bridge keepers. One man's arrangement with a 17th-century governor at those rapids would give the village its very name.

• 2. The Bridge Guard's Bargain

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  In the 1650s, the bridge over the Nukarinkoski rapids required constant caretakers. The road that crossed there linked major towns and could not be left untended.

  A burgess named Erkki Nukari saw an opening. He offered to serve as bridge guard in exchange for rights to the forested land nearby. In 1662, Governor Ernst Johan Creutz granted him the wilderness of East Vantaa, the area that now forms the village.

  Erkki founded a permanent tavern on the site and is recognized as the first real farmer in Vantaa. His name, attached to a place and a trade, became the village's own. The rapids at Nukarinkoski that made his bargain possible would prove to be a resource the village kept returning to for centuries.

• 3. The Nukarinkoski Mills

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  A watermill was already grinding at the Nukarinkoski rapids by the end of the 16th century, long before Erkki's land grant. By the 1660s, two mills worked the same stretch of water. Sawmills followed in later years, and by the 20th century a lumber factory operated alongside another mill.

  The Nurmijärvi Municipal Power Plant drew up plans to build a power station at Nukarinkoski at the turn of the 1920s. High costs stopped the project. The rapids served a more modest purpose instead: log driving, which moved timber through Nukarinkoski in the 1920s and again in the 1950s.

  Matilda Adlercreutz had already opened a school in Nukari while those mills were still running.

• 4. Matilda's School

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  In 1873, the first volksschule in Nurmijärvi opened in Nukari. Matilda Adlercreutz, the lady of Raala Manor, founded it. She believed the workers, laborers, and crofters of the manor, and their children above all, deserved instruction and education.

  Forty-one students enrolled that first autumn. The school ran for decades, and in 1900, Adlercreutz donated it to the municipality. Today it serves as the Nukari School Museum.

  The Finnish-Thai Buddhist Association would eventually bring a new kind of institution to Nukari, one that none of those first students could have imagined.

• 5. Buddharama

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  The Finnish-Thai Buddhist Association purchased a house in Nukari in 2009 and established a Thai Buddhist temple there. A new ceremony house on the grounds was completed in 2020, with capacity for 250 people. In 2021, two bhikkhus (ordained monks) and one novice took up residence at the Buddharama temple.

  In the 1980s, two village shops, a bank, a post office, and a hairdressing salon gave Nukari a modest commercial center. All of those services are gone today. The nearest shops are in Jokela, four kilometers away. A single filling station remains, and the village still has a primary school and a kindergarten.

  The formal opening of the ceremony house was delayed until 2022 by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nukari Temple is now the largest of Finland's three Thai Buddhist temples, in a village that sits 45 kilometers from Helsinki.