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The Times of India
The Times of India
World
TOI World Desk

In 1885, Finland built a lighthouse on Sweden’s side of an island; 100 years later, both countries bent the border around it

Imagine building a house and then discovering that half of it sits on your neighbour’s property, and that neighbour is another country. That is roughly what happened on Märket, a tiny 3.3-hectare island in the Baltic Sea divided between Sweden and Finland. The peer-reviewed study, ‘ The Peace Treaty of Fredrikshamn and its Aftermath in Sweden and Finland ,’ by the historian Petri Karonen, who co-authored the study, describes how the 1809 Treaty of Fredrikshamn forced Sweden to cede all of Finland, including the Åland Islands, to Russia after a war between the two countries. According to Finland's National Land Survey and multiple historical accounts of the border, this treaty created a straight line dividing the island itself, with the precise coordinates of that split formalized in a topographic survey in 1811.

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