Paper short abstract:

The rock of Märket in the Baltic Sea, being crisscrossed with regional and international borders, offers a lucid case of heritage management and contested ownership of the past. Tourists come here to jump across the borders, but in which territory they land is an issue of interpretation.

Paper long abstract:

In borderlands, where territories chafe on one another, friction can occur. On a tiny rock in the Baltic Sea, located between the Swedish coast and the Finnish landscape of Åland, heritage practices and bordering processes are in full speed. The rock of Märket is crisscrossed with borders due to long demarcation processes, and the Finnish/Swedish state border here coincides with the border of the autonomous and demilitarised province of Åland, making half the rock simultaneously Finnish and Ålandic. Since Märket is also a site of border heritagisation, its ownership and related revenues from tourism are contested issues, revealing conflicts between the majority of the Finnish state and the minority of Åland. The shared-ness of the border, rather than the divided-ness of the rock between the well-defined states, makes the site a touchy issue. Being a demarcated minority, Åland depends on its borders for both financial and cultural reasons, but whose proprietary counts more in a dually owned border? As a part of an ethnological dissertation project tracking the changes of demarcation and perceptions of the maritime borders around the province of Åland, Märket has arisen as a hot spot of heritage conflict and management. Ethnological fieldwork consisting of participant observation, interviews and archive material shows how this border is a site of competition over ownership and representations of the past. The border dividing the rock of Märket becomes a lucid example of concurrently very local and transnational borderland heritage practices, bringing tension and different interpretations to the fore.