Every design for Parkano

Parkano sits where three regions meet, Pirkanmaa, Satakunta and South Ostrobothnia, at the crossing of two national highways and on the railway between Tampere and Seinäjoki. In the Middle Ages it was the northernmost village of the great parish of Kyrö, and Linna, a house on Lake Linnanjärvi, was the northernmost homestead in all of Satakunta.

There is a frontier feeling to the place even now. The name comes, folk tradition says, from a barked pine at Haaparo, where the river from Kirkkojärvi meets the Viinikanjoki, a tree where wilderness hunters arranged to meet. Sámi place names still linger in the surrounding country, settlers arrived from the south and a few from Savo in the east, the famine years of the nineteenth century took hundreds of lives, and after the Continuation War evacuees from Kaukola made new homes here. Today the town works in machinery, metal and timber.

One midsummer day lightning struck the church tower in the middle of a confirmation service; a memorial in the churchyard recalls the panic that followed and the downpour that put out the fire. Militariamuseo Karhumäki and the Parkanon kotiseutumuseo keep the town's longer memory, and that memory is exactly what a Parkano shirt carries.