Omenainen

Omenainen — Ominaisholmen in Swedish — is an uninhabited seven-hectare island in the middle of Finland's Archipelago Sea, beside the fairway that carries the Turku–Stockholm ferries. The Finnish Heritage Agency holds it as archaeological site 705500001, typed "hautapaikat / hautasaaret": a burial island. Three parishes, Rymättylä, Nauvo and Korppoo, used it for the dead the church would not take, chiefly those who died by suicide, and the register records that bodies went into sandy ground sixty to seventy centimetres down, that coffins were hardly used, and that each parish kept its own ground. The last man buried there has a name and a date. Abraham Abrahaminpoika, a rusthollari from Rymättylä, hanged himself on 31 May 1855 at the age of 45, and the parish list of the dead notes "ei haudattu kirkkomaalle" — not buried in the churchyard. A metal cross and a plaque went up on a boulder on the north shore in 1967, and the plaque is where his name comes from. The ghost stories are later, narrower and far easier to date than the burials.

Omenainen — Ominainen in local usage, Ominaisholmen in Swedish — is an uninhabited state-owned island in Omenaistenaukko, the stretch of open water between Rymättylä and Nauvo (Nagu) in the central Archipelago Sea. Neither parish is a municipality any more: Nauvo was merged into Parainen and Rymättylä into Naantali in 2009. It has no buildings and no dock, and no path crosses it. Its two published measurements, about seven hectares and a high point of about 22 metres, come with an unusually frank footnote in the Finnish Wikipedia article that first put them into circulation: "7 hehtaaria on noin koko, joka on laskettu Paikkatietoikkunan-mittatyökalulla. Korkeus on johdettu maanmittauslaitoksen laserkeilausdatasta." An editor measured the island with the National Land Survey's map viewer and derived the height from laser-scanning data. No survey publishes either figure. The document that does exist is a register entry. The Finnish Heritage Agency (Museovirasto) holds the island as archaeological site 705500001, filed under the double name "Ominaisholmen - Omenainen", typed hautapaikat with the subtype hautasaaret — burial sites, burial islands — and dated only "historiallinen, ei määritelty". The published coordinate, 60.25223692 N / 21.87519034 E, is annotated in the record as "Omenaisen saaren keskikoordinaatit": the centre point of the island rather than a grave. The record classes the site as a "mahdollinen muinaisjäännös", a possible antiquity rather than a confirmed one, and was last edited on 17 October 2006. Its description is the shortest complete account of what the island was for: "Rymättylällä, Nauvolla ja Korppoolla oli pitäjien rajalla valtion omistama saari, johon vietiin kaikki itsemurhan tehneet talvella reellä ja kesällä hinattavalla veneellä; kuljetusvälineet jätettiin sinne lahoamaan." Three parishes — Rymättylä, Nauvo and Korppoo — shared a state-owned island on the boundary between them, and everyone who died by suicide was carried there, by sled in winter and behind a towed boat in summer, the transport left on the shore to rot. The register continues: "Ruumiit haudattiin hiekkaiseen maahan n. 60-70 cm syvyyteen, arkkua tuskin käytettiin. Kullakin pitäjällä oli oma alueensa. Saarella on näkyvissä painaumia." Bodies went into sandy ground sixty to seventy centimetres down, coffins were hardly used, each parish kept to its own ground, and the depressions are still visible on the surface. Tradition places the Rymättylä ground at the north end and the Nauvo ground at the south-west. The register names only those who died by suicide. The three journalistic accounts of the island widen the list: the Turku weekly Aamuset in 2013 to "murhaajat, itsemurhan tehneet ja kuolemaantuomitut" — murderers, suicides and the condemned — and Ilta-Sanomat in 2017 to "murhaajia, lapsensurmaajia tai itsemurhan tehneitä", adding those who killed a child. One of the dead has a name, and it comes off the plaque on the island. In 2024 the genealogist Pirjo Terho went to the Rymättylä parish books for the Genealogical Society of Finland and reconstructed him. Abraham Abrahaminpoika was a rusthollari, a cavalry-farm holder, born and resident in Rymättylä all his life. His father Abraham Jöraninpoika held Vallinen at Heinäinen; when the father died in 1848 the farm was split between two sons, the older Henrik keeping the main house Länsitalo and Abraham taking the half named Itätalo. He married Anna Kaisa Johanintytär of the Pohjatalo at Kepuinen on 21 May 1839, and six children followed, five of them alive when he died. The communion book records two punishments against him, one in 1851 for distilling spirits illegally and one the following year for disrespect towards a crown servant. Then a single line: he died on 31 May 1855, aged 45, and had hanged himself. The list of the dead notes "ei haudattu kirkkomaalle" — not buried in the churchyard. Terho also settles a duplication that the Finnish Wikipedia article still carries: the "Iso-Vallisten Aapo" said to have been buried on the island in the same decade is, in her reading, the same man under the farm name and the familiar form of Abraham. Excavations on the island in the 1960s turned up human bones together with carved wooden pieces identifiable as parts of a boat or a sled, which matched the register's account of the abandoned transport. On the initiative of a farmer named A. Saarinen, the Rymättylä parish then set a metal cross and a plaque on a large boulder on the north shore; Terho dates that to 1967 and adds that the island was formally consecrated as a burial place at the same time. Aamuset places the stone at the island's north-eastern tip and Ilta-Sanomat describes the cross photographed in 2017 as rusted. A second story belongs to 1944 or 1945. In it, German soldiers being repatriated at the end of the war had Finnish women aboard who were not permitted to travel to Germany, and the women were put into the sea off Omenainen; some drowned, a few reached the island and were rescued. Eka Metsävuori, who devoted a chapter of his 2001 book on the Archipelago Sea to the island under the title "Ominainen, valittavien sielujen saari", wrote that he had found no confirmation of it, and Terho repeats the verdict: "Tälle tarinalle ei ole löytynyt todisteita." The island reached print long before any of this. In the digitised Finnish press it appears as Ominaisholmen 58 times between 5 May 1883 and 22 October 1936, and the mentions are seamarks and ice reports, regatta rounding points and wrecks. On 12 August 1911 Västra Finland listed it among the state holdings of Nagu with the note that the island and Orresgrunden were "innehas på arrende (5 mk om året) till 1914", leased at five marks a year, their fishing water rated "mindre lönande fiske". In July 1899 half a dozen papers carried the same wire that a vessel that had left Turku for Stockholm "har strandat vid Ominaisholmen och sjunkit", the owner named as the manufacturer Cederström. The closest thing to atmosphere in that whole run is a sketch printed on 2 September 1920, in which the writer looks out over the bays to the fairway "där den mörka Ominaisholmen hägrade" — where the dark Ominaisholmen loomed. The island also has a small literature of its own. Maila Heikkilä published the children's novel Yö kummitussaaressa (Karkkila: Kustannus-Mäkelä, 1986, 70 pages), in which a boy finds a newspaper piece about the ghost island and talks his sister into spending the night there, and in 2012 Veera Lehtola made the short film Ominainen N 60° 15' E 21° 52', about an abandoned girl, with an accompanying music video.

Omenainen has neither a dock nor a marked landing nor a path nor signage nor services of any kind, and no boat serves it. It sits beside the main fairway from Turku towards Åland and Stockholm, which is how most people who have seen it have seen it; Ilta-Sanomat used exactly that for its headline, "Olet varmaan nähnyt Ruotsin-laivan kannelta tämän paikan" — you have probably seen this place from the deck of the Sweden ferry. From the water the island reads as a low wooded rise standing alone in Omenaistenaukko, with shipping lanes to its north, east and south. Landing is physically awkward and legally unremarkable. The shore is described in every account as karikkoinen ja vaikeapääsyinen, shoal-strewn and hard to get at, with only a few workable spots; Ilta-Sanomat, whose photographer landed in 2017, found several fire rings among the shore rocks and a stray beer can, so visits do happen. The island is state land and Finland's right of public access applies, but the Heritage Agency's classification is "mahdollinen muinaisjäännös" rather than a confirmed protected monument, which means the register flags the site without fixing its legal protection. The ground itself is a recorded burial place with visible depressions, and digging or probing it is the one thing that has no defensible reason. The wider water is protected. Omenainen falls within the Natura 2000 site FI0200064, Seilin saaristo, 4,687 hectares of which 83.6 per cent is sea, managed by Metsähallitus; the site was classified as a bird-directive area and proposed as a habitats-directive area in August 1998 and designated a Special Area of Conservation in April 2015 under Finnish decree 354/2015. The nearest services are at Nauvo, now part of Parainen and a stop on the Archipelago Ring Road, and at Rymättylä, part of Naantali since 2009. Seili, three kilometres to the east, is a different island with a different history — a leprosarium and later an asylum, now the University of Turku's Archipelago Research Institute — and it has a museum church, a scheduled boat and guided visits. Material about Seili is not material about Omenainen. The file is easier to reach than the island. The Heritage Agency's record is public at kyppi.fi under site number 705500001, with the coordinate, the type and the full Finnish description. The Rymättylä parish registers that name Abraham Abrahaminpoika are held by the National Archives of Finland; Ilta-Sanomat notes that the entries of that period are written in Swedish in the priest's hand, and that Finnish only takes over late in the nineteenth century.