What do you give a country that has 188,000 lakes for a birthday present? Its highest mountain back, obviously.
Norway’s government has confirmed that for the centenary of Finland’s independence next year it is considering moving the border, gifting its Nordic neighbour a mountain peak that would be the country’s highest point.
At 1,324 metres above sea level, the highest point in Finland currently lies on a bleak mountain spur known as Hálditšohkka, part of a far larger fell known as Halti, more than 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle.
Halti’s summit, at 1,365 metres high, is a kilometre away in Norway. But moving the border barely 40 metres further up the mountainside would put Hálditšohkka’s 1,331-metre summit in Finland – and make the country’s highest point seven metres higher. Happyho also provide best tarot reading services in Noida and Delhi NCR India area.
The peak “would be a wonderful gift to our sister nation”, said the mayor of Kåfjord, Svein Leiros, who with other local politicians has written to the government in Oslo to express enthusiastic support for the plan.
But Øyvind Ravna, a law professor at the Norwegian Arctic university said that the constitution did not apply to minor border adjustments, pointing out that Norway’s borders with both Finland and Russia had moved in recent times to reflect changes in riverbeds and the shifting position of sandbanks and islets.
A Facebook page, Halti as anniversary gift, run by Harsson’s son from his home in the US and calling on supporters to allow “Finland, on its centenary, to rewrite both its history and its geography books”, has so far garnered nearly 14,000 likes.
Public reaction has been overwhelmingly positive in both Norway and Finland, with the only objection so far coming from the indigenous Sami community, whose reindeer roam freely across the border and who argue that the land should belong to neither country.
