Norway considers giving mountain to Finland as 100th birthday present

Norwegian government considers shifting border to gift its Nordic neighbour a peak that would become its highest point


News Desk July 29, 2016
A climber takes in the view from the summit of Halti. PHOTO: GUARDIAN/Alamy Stock Photo

Norway has confirmed that it is looking into gifting its Nordic neighbour Finland a mountain peak that would become the latter’s highest point in connection with the centenary of Finnish independence.

“There are a few formal difficulties and I have not yet made my final decision,” Norway Prime Minister Erna Solberg told NRK, the national broadcaster. “But we are looking into it,” she said.

At 1,324 metres above sea level, the highest point in Finland currently lies on a bleak mountain spur known as Hálditšohkka, part of a far larger fell known as Halti, more than 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

Halti’s summit, 1,365 metres high, is a kilometre away in Norway. But moving the border barely 40 metres further up the mountainside would put Hálditšohkka’s 1,331-metre summit in Finland – and make the country’s highest point seven metres higher.

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“Geophysically speaking, Mount Halti has two peaks, one Finnish and one Norwegian,” NRK explained to bemused viewers earlier this year. “What is proposed is that Norway gives the Finnish peak to Finland, because it is currently in Norway.”

The peak “would be a wonderful gift to our sister nation”, said the mayor of Kåfjord, Svein Leiros, who with other local politicians has written to the government in Oslo to pledge emphatic support for the plan.

“We want to reach out a hand to our neighbour that we will be able to shake across the summit.” Nor would mountainous Norway actually be losing much, Leiros said, since its highest peak is the mighty Galdhøpiggen, at 2,469 metres.

The retired geophysicist and government surveyor, Bjørn Geirr Harsson, 76-years-old, was the one who floated the proposal. He recalled being left puzzled by the border’s location while flying over Halti in the 1970s. Harsson wrote to the ministry of foreign affairs in July, 2015 pointing out that the gesture would cost Norway a “barely noticeable” 0.015 square kilometres of its territory and leave Finland ecstatic.

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The border, a straight line drawn in the 1750s, was “geophysically illogical,” he has since told Norwegian media, and it was unfortunate and unfair for Finland that its highest point was not even a proper peak.

Responding, the foreign ministry said that although it appreciated the suggestion, Article 1 of the Norwegian Constitution stipulated that the country is a “free, independent, indivisible and inalienable realm.”

The idea has garnered both, support and opposition. One of the people opposing the idea is Parliamentary Scrutiny Committee Deputy Chair Michael Tetzschner who told Aftenposten earlier this year that the plan was “bewildering” and “a joke,” stressing that the Constitution “clearly prohibits the state from surrendering any part of Norwegian territory to another power.”

But Øyvind Ravna, a law professor at the Norwegian Arctic university, told the paper the Constitution did not apply to minor border adjustments, pointing out that Norway’s borders with both Finland and Russia had moved in recent times to reflect changes in riverbeds and the shifting position of sandbanks and islets.

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A Facebook page, Halti as anniversary gift, run by Harsson’s son from his home in the United States is calling on supporters to allow “Finland, on its centenary, to rewrite both its history and its geography books.” The page has so far garnered nearly 14,000 likes.

Public reaction has mostly been positive in Norway and Finland, with the only objection so far coming from the indigenous Sami community, whose reindeer freely traverse the border and who argue that the land should belong to neither country.

“Who knows?” Harsson told NRK. “It may really happen.”

This article originally appeared on Guardian. 

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