SWEDISH CHURCHES IN RUSSIA AND THEIR HISTORICAL SOURCES

E. Norberg

For more than three hundred years a Swedish church stood at the place where the river Neva meets the Finnish Gulf. The rst church was founded in the early seventeenth century, when for a certain time the territory was in Swedish hands, the second one when the new city of St. Petersburg started to develop into a capital of European size and importance. For the numerous Swedes in St. Petersburg the Church of St. Catherine (S:ta Katarina) was the religious, cultural, and social centre of the town. The rst two paragraphs of the present article are devoted to these two churches: the Swedish church in the small town of Nyen and the church administration in this province, the province of Ingria, and next the Church of St. Catherine in St. Petersburg. The third paragraph deals with the religious life of the prisoners of war who lived in Russia during the Great Northern War and the church that was founded in Tobolsk in Siberia. Finally, the fourth paragraph is on the church founded by the Swedes who moved from Estonia to Ukraine under the reign of Catherine the Great.

The Swedish church in Nyen and the church administration in the province of Ingria

Aspirations to restore the old territory of the Teutonic Order, the important routes of trade along the rivers leading to the eastern shore of the Baltic, and unclear dynastic circumstances, naturally led to rivalry between Sweden, Poland, and Russia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At the Peace of Stolbova in 1617, Sweden acquired the territory along the Baltic between Finland and Estonia. This meant that the inner part of the Finnish Gulf mainly consisting of the province Ingria, was in Swedish hands. Ingria or Ingermanland was a rural province east of Estonia, with a large population of Ingrians, Russians, and Finns, to which from that time a growing number of Swedes and Germans were added. 42 e. norberg

Fig. 4.1. Map of St. Petersburg in 1719.

Nyen was the Swedish word for the river Neva. An important condition for the Swedish Government was to make use of the traf c and trade on this river, leading to and from the vast Lake Ladoga, and further on to the rich city of Novgorod by way of the river Volchov. Sweden controlled the inlet in Lake Ladoga through the fortress Nöteborg, later on Schlüsselburg, and the outlet in the Finnish Gulf. Already during the wars of the 1580s the Swedish King Johan III had talked of the need to fortify the outlet as well, and during the rst years of the seventeenth century work started on the fortress Nyenskans. The place chosen was a little upstream, at the con uence of the Neva and the small river Ochta, just opposite the Smolny in present-day St. Petersburg. In 1632 King Gustavus Adolphus presented the garrison with town privileges. The population grew steadily to about 2,000 inhabitants, which made Nyen a large city in this eastern part of the Swedish realm, probably second only to Turku in Finland. The Swedish-Finnish church in Nyen dates from the same year, 1632. In the city there were altogether three churches catering for