, , or is a village in
Kvænangen Municipality
Kvænangen (; ) is a List of municipalities of Norway, municipality in Troms Counties of Norway, county, Norway. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Burfjord. Other notable villages in the municipality include Alteide ...
in
Troms
Troms (; ; ; ) is a Counties of Norway, county in northern Norway. It borders Finnmark county to the northeast and Nordland county in the southwest. Norrbotten Län in Sweden is located to the south and further southeast is a shorter border with ...
county,
Norway
Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...
.
Geography
The village is located along the shore of Kjækan Bay (, , or ''Geahkkánluokta'') at the southeast end of the
Kvænangen fjord, about south of the municipal center of
Burfjord.
County Road 367 runs through the village. The Kjækan River (, , ) flows into the village from the east and empties into the bay.
Name
The name of the village is semantically opaque; neither the Norwegian name ''Kjækan'' nor Northern Sami name ''Geahkán'' has a clear meaning. However, the Kven name ''Kätkynen'' indicates that the name may be derived from Sami ''geatki'' 'wolverine, glutton'. If so, the name of the village was originally Sami (now lost), the Kven name was borrowed from Sami, the Norwegian name from Kven, and the current Sami name from Norwegian. A
pseudoetymology of the name associates it with the Kven verb ''kätkeä'' 'hide, conceal', referring to copper ore "hidden" up in the valley above the village.
History
Copper ore
Copper is a chemical element; it has symbol Cu (from Latin ) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish-orang ...
was discovered above Kjækan in the 19th century
by agents for the
Alta-based
Alten Copper Works, a firm owned by the British merchant
John Rice Crowe (1795–1877). Copper ore was mined at the site from 1840 to 1878.
However, the effort of transporting the ore down to the bay for transport to the nearby village of
Kåfjord for smelting made it difficult to exploit the deposit.
The mining activity corresponded to a population surge: in 1835 there were only 100 people in the village, but by 1865 the population had grown to 546. The population declined to 357 in 1875, as the mine was shutting down, and by 1900 there were only 201 people living in Kjækan.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kjaekan
Villages in Troms
Kvænangen