In a stone clock outside Bodø are the remains of a person who has been dead for a long time. The bones and bones lie out in the open, which must have been typical of pre-Christian Sami burial customs. But now the grave, which is supposed to date from before the 18th century, has been tampered with. Kjell Skjerve was first shown the grave at the end of the 70s. Last summer he looked it up again, and discovered that someone had moved the skeleton. – Someone had put the skull on top of the plank, probably to make a better picture. Only that I think is grave desecration. When he was going to revisit it with his grandson a couple of weeks ago, he saw that something important was missing. The skull. – It is simply a grotesque act. I have no other word for it. That someone might have a skull of someone who has been dead for several hundred years on their bookshelf, I don’t think anything of that. Supposed to have been a hat in the grave Skjerve contacted the National Antiquities Agency, which he passed on to the Sami Parliament. It was Bodø Nu that first mentioned the case. Senior advisor for cultural monuments in the Sami Parliament, Sidsel Bakke, tells news that these burial grounds are easy to destroy without anyone finding out who has done it. That’s why they try to keep the burial sites secret as much as possible. – Several of these graves are known, but they are very vulnerable. If people trip over them, then it is easy to destroy. It is also easy to remove something without anyone seeing it. She finds it despairing that the skull has now been removed from the grave. – I think it is very sad. These are vulnerable cultural monuments that should be left alone. It’s basically the same as taking something from a graveyard. According to Bakke, there should also have been a Sami hat at the burial site, which was last seen before the war. – It is written that there was a Sami hat, a woman’s hat, in this grave. It has either been removed or disintegrated, but we don’t know. Assessing review Bakke says that these graves were typical of pre-Christian Sami culture, and that it was important for them to be airy and open, preferably between stones and inside rock crevices. – We have previously considered securing the grave so that this cannot happen as easily. But such safeguards are also an intervention, so we have not done so. Since it is a grave that dates from before the Christianization of the Sami, which happened at the beginning of the 18th century, they estimate that it is older than that. The Sámi Parliament will now visit the site, and then they will consider reporting the matter to the police. – It is a criminal act to desecrate a grave. We will consider reporting to the Sámi Parliament, and inspect the site.
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A skull that was a cultural monument disappeared from a several-hundred-year-old Sami grave outside Bodø – news Nordland
