Several years had passed since I and my friends visited the village of Otanmäki near Kajaani. Although it is far from abandoned, it’s been in quite of a decline since the mine closed in the 1980’s. The location is remote and the houses are way too large for the area thus resulting in the cheapest apartments in whole of Finland.
I still didn’t expect to find any abandoned houses, but I was curious to see if the place had changed in any way.
Turns out that the changes were minimal if there had been any.
The streets looked as quiet as ever and business didn’t seem to be thriving.
The sign of the old bar is still on the wall, but the bar has reopened with a new name.
The houses were in the need of fresh paint back in 2013. They still are.
All of them are.
The same sign I photographed back in 2013.
I’ve mentioned several times before that I love the 1950’s architecture. There’s something so harmonious in these buildings.
They would need love and care too. But that may be coming.
The mine was replaced by a state owned railroad car factory, which was sold to Skoda in 2015. As the national railway company is heavily renewing its fleet and the city of Helsinki has ordered loads of new trams, there has actually been work again. There actually is a shortage of workers, as nobody wants to move this far away from everything. They are now recruiting welders from the Philippines.
And back in 2013 we visited the old mine area, where we could walk right in. My friend tried the same a few years later and said that an alarm system and cameras had been installed. They have actually started taking samples from the ground with the view of restarting production.
With this in mind, I decided to visit another old mine nearby, but didn’t get very far.
I didn’t even get close, when a recorded voice started telling me I am being video recorded, so I turned away.
Maybe the old mining village has a future after all.