() is a former Finnish

market town A market town is a settlement most common in Europe that obtained by custom or royal charter, in the Middle Ages, a market right, which allowed it to host a regular market; this distinguished it from a village or city. In Britain, small rura ...

in the

South Karelia South Karelia (or ''Southern Karelia'', ; ) is a Regions of Finland, region of Finland. It borders the regions of Kymenlaakso, Southern Savonia, South Savo and North Karelia, as well as Russia (Republic of Karelia and Leningrad Oblast). Hist ...

region. It was closed down on 1 January 1967 and was incorporated into

Lappeenranta Lappeenranta (; ) is a city in Finland and the regional capital of South Karelia. It is located in the southeastern interior of the country and in the Finnish Lakeland. The population of Lappeenranta is approximately , while the Lappeenranta sub-r ...

. The present district of Lauritsala comprises only the center of the former town.

History

Lauritsala was originally one of the villages of the Lappee parish. It has existed at least since 1558, when it was mentioned as ''Lawritzala''. Its name is derived from the surname ''Lauritsainen'', which in turn is derived from the name of

Saint Lawrence Saint Lawrence or Laurence (; 31 December 225 – 10 August 258) was one of the seven deacons of the city of Rome under Pope Sixtus II who were martyred in the Persecution of Christians, persecution of the Christians that the Roman Empire, Rom ...

. Lauritsala became an independent municipality in 1932. The former Lauritsala market area had 12,965 inhabitants in 1966. It is home to UPM-Kymmene's Kaukas mills and part of the Saimaa Canal. The center of Lappeenranta is about four kilometres away. There are old detached houses and blocks of flats in the area, with new settlements. In 1960, Lauritsala's population density included Mustola (341 inhabitants, partly on the Lappee side) and Mälki (322 inhabitants). The Lappeenranta and Lauritsala population centres had grown together and are now called Lappeenranta centre, with 32,174 inhabitants in 1960. In addition, part of the Laihia settlement in Lappee municipality extended to Lauritsala.

Notable people

* Seppo Ahokainen, Finnish professional ice hockey player * Teuvo Kohonen, Finnish researcher, best known for the development of

self-organizing map A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher-dimensional data set while preserving the t ...

Arvi Lind Arvi Kullervo Lind (born December 21, 1940) is a retired Finnish television news presenter. He worked as the news anchor on Yleisradio TV1 from 1965 to 2003. Along with Kari Toivonen, he was one of the longest-serving employees of Yleisradio ...

, Finnish television news presenter * Eino Valle, Finnish long-distance runner

Places and events

* Lauritsala Church * Lauritsala's library was described by L. R. McColvin (City Librarian at Westminster, London) as: "the most attractive, most beautiful small library I have ever seen in the world."

Gallery

References

External links