Mikkeli

Mikkeli lies in the lake country of Savo in eastern Finland. The 1323 Treaty of Nöteborg placed the Savilahti parish under Swedish rule; the locality had acquired the name Mikkeli, after the archangel Michael, by the early sixteenth century. In January 1597 more than two hundred peasant rebels were killed at the Kenkävero parsonage during the Cudgel War. The district again lay near fighting in 1789, when Swedish forces defeated a Russian attack at Porrassalmi south of the settlement. Finland passed under Russian rule in 1809, and Mikkeli received its town charter in 1838, just beyond the period represented here. Before its formal establishment as a town, the parish served a countryside of farms, forests and lakes.