mehikasveilla

Mehikasveilla is a geographic name that appears in several early 19th‑century Finnish cartographic sources and in local oral traditions of the municipality of Pello in the northern Kainuu region. The term is first documented in the 1812 edition of the Taaleri provincial survey as “Mehikas Välla,” where it is identified as a shallow valley adjacent to a small lake of the same name. The name subsequently appears in the 1834 Pello municipal map and in the 1853 Kainuu land register.

The lexical components of Mehikasveilla are not firmly established in modern Finnish. The element “mehikas” is sometimes interpreted as a variant of the archaic Finnish word “mehk‑” (meaning “soft” or “tender”), while the suffix “‑välla” is a derivative of “valla,” an old name for a low, broad valley. Linguistic studies such as Koskimies (1978) argue that the compound should be understood as describing a valley of soft, gently sloping terrain. However, the precise derivation remains provisional because contemporary sources provide no explicit explanation.

Local folklore associates Mehikasveilla with an event described in the 1891 ethnographic compilation by Arvo Pyy, in which a group of hunters purportedly discovered a stone artefact in the valley that was believed to possess healing properties. Though no archaeological investigation has yet confirmed the claim, the narrative illustrates how the name has been embedded in regional cultural memory.

In contemporary usage, Mehikasveilla is occasionally mentioned in discussions of traditional place names within the Kainuu cultural heritage program, although it is not a commonly used feature in modern navigation or tourism. Further research is needed to clarify the name’s semantic roots and to determine whether the valley still retains any physical features that could explain the original descriptor.