Every design for Närpes

Ever heard Ostrobothnian Swedish spoken so broadly that even other Swedish speakers struggle to keep up? Then you have met Närpes (Närpiö in Finnish), a town on Finland's west coast where the land breaks up into bays, islets and river mouths along the Gulf of Bothnia. More than half of the municipality is water, and the farmland in between runs flat and open towards the sea.

Sankaripatsas "Haavoittunut soturi", the statue of a wounded soldier, is one of the town's memorials to its past, and the parish itself goes back to the Middle Ages. Its limewashed stone church is ringed by more than a hundred church stables where worshippers once left their horses, an ensemble found nowhere else in Finland. Today Närpes is known for greenhouses full of tomatoes and for building trailers for lorries, and it has the largest share of Vietnamese speakers of any Finnish municipality, so the shop queue may switch between three languages.

The wounded soldier, Vapaussodan muistomerkki, the stables round the church and the coast at the end of every road all sit on one map of Närpes, which is reason enough to wear it.