Last modified: 2026-04-23 by tomislav todorovic
Keywords: sweden | finland | torne valley | tricolor |
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image by Tomislav Todorovic, 7 July 2023
The land border between Sweden and Finland mostly runs along the Torne River. The river valley has long been influenced by this situation. On 15 July 2007 obviously a new flag for the valley has been presented, a yellow-white-blue horizontal tricolor. It was presented by the organisation Meänmaan-Tinkerit, which is active on both sides of the border.
It is almost, but not quite like the flags we already have for the Tornedalians (an ethnic group in this part of Sweden who is speaking a language called Meän-kieli which is closely related to Finnish).
Elias Granqvist, 6 August 2007
The Tornedalian flag is yellow-white-blue horizontal tricolor with the ratio of 7:11. Designed by Herbert Wirlöf, it was adopted by the Meänmaa association on 2007-06-05, its founding day and was officially raised for the first time on 2007-07-15. The colors are taken from the national flags of Sweden and Finland, but unlike those, the design was chosen to be a simple tricolor because the Tornedalians "have not been crusaders". The colors also symbolize the sun, sky and winter. The flag day is 15th July, which is also the Tornedalians' Day since 2015.
Sources:
[1] Tornedalian flag at Wikipedia (in Swedish)
[2] Anton Pihl's blog
[3] Photo of the flag at Facebook
[4] Photo of the flag at Reddit
Tomislav Todorovic, 7 July 2023
