page_title: Orthodox Church of Finland
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Orthodox Church of Finland / History
caption_attribution_description: English: St. George and the Dragon. Fresco from St George's Church in Old Ladoga (late 12th c.)
context_page_description: The Orthodox Church of Finland is an autonomous Eastern Orthodox archdiocese of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The church has a legal position as a national church in the country, along with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland.
  With its roots in the medieval Novgorodian missionary work in Karelia, the Orthodox Church of Finland was a part of the Russian Orthodox Church until 1923. Today the church has three dioceses and 59,000 members that account for 1.1 percent of the native population of Finland. The parish of Helsinki has the most adherents.
context_section_description: Christianity started to spread to Finland from the east in the Orthodox form and from the west in the Catholic form at the latest in the beginning of the 12th century. Some of the earliest excavated crosses in Finland, dating from the 12th century onward, are similar to a type found in Novgorod and Kiev. Orthodox parishes are believed to have existed as far to the west as Tavastia, the area inhabited by Tavastians in Central Finland.
  Some core concepts of the Christian vocabulary in the Finnish language are supposed to be loans from early Russian, which in turn has borrowed them from Mediaeval Greek. These include the words for priest (pappi), cross (risti) and Bible (raamattu). This hypothesis is, however, not unchallenged.
caption: Early Christian art in a territory inhabited by Karelians: fresco painted in 1167 in St. George's church in Staraya Ladoga.
exif: {"Image Software": "Picasa 3.0", "Image ExifOffset": "50", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "640", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "590", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "150", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "950e6542ad21736fcb1ae633d31da315"}