About 150 years ago, Swedish researchers dug up dozens of human skulls and remains from graveyards across Finland and took them to Sweden to study their racial characteristics as part of an effort that they said was to understand how the Nordic region had been populated.
On Sunday, 42 of those skulls were returned and reinterred in Palkane, a small community in Finland about 80 miles northwest of Helsinki, the capital, where residents hailed their homecoming as the righting of a historic wrong.
"They are our own people, even if they lived hundreds of years ago," Pauliina Pikka, a local official, said in an interview before the ceremony. "They deserve, now, to come back here. They deserve to get rest."
The skulls were taken in the summer of 1873 by three researchers working for the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Sweden, who dug up graves in four communities in Finland. They returned to Sweden with human remains from the exhumations and measured and studied them. For decades until 2015, human remains taken by researchers were housed in various Swedish institutions before being returned to Karolinska.
Since then, the university has been researching the origins of some of the remains and repatriating them.
On Sunday, under clear blue skies and balmy temperatures, residents of Palkane gathered to watch the return of the skulls to the church -- which has been in ruins for centuries -- from which they had been taken in 1873.
As a military band played, the skulls arrived in a horse-drawn carriage driven by people in old-fashioned clothing. Four men carried each coffin before lowering it into a grave. Some community members cast dirt and sand over the graves.
"People feel that they are participating in something meaningful," said Marketta Pyysalo, the cultural coordinator for Palkane. "This is a handshake with the past."
Most of the skulls brought back to Palkane were likely buried between the 1500s and the 1800s, said Ulla Moilanen, an archaeologist at the University of Turku. But their identities remain unknown, and she hopes to analyze DNA samples she had taken from the skulls to find out more about them.
"When we find out more about these people, their lives, they really become part of history, not just as skulls, but as human beings," she said.
Hanna-Liisa Anttila, 90, whose family is from elsewhere in Finland and who came to the ceremony dressed in a national costume, said it was possible the ancestors of her husband, who is from Palkane, might be among the taken skulls.
She said the remains' removal was a "desecration" of the graves.
The Swedish researchers who exhumed the graves wondered whether Finns were a different race from Swedes, noting that the Finnish language is more closely related to Estonian and Hungarian than Swedish, and believed that an examination of the skulls would answer their questions.
For many people in Finland, those questions about whether they are a different race sounded a lot like an effort to prove that they were an inferior one.
"They kind of wanted to put us down and thought maybe that they could do whatever they like with our skulls and remains," Ms. Pikka said, "that those people weren't important."
Many said the research on the Finnish skulls made them think of eugenics, a discredited scientific theory that was used to justify atrocities including the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, segregation in the United States, and the forced sterilization of people in Sweden and Finland and other Nordic nations, and countries including the United States.
"Research developed down this rabbit hole of physical measurements to try to prove the superiority of one race over another," said Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, a professor of Scandinavian and comparative literature at University College London.
"It had a huge international following," added Dr. Stougaard-Nielsen, who chaired a 2021 seminar titled "The Legacy of Eugenics in Scandinavia."
In 1921, Sweden's Parliament established the State Institute for Racial Biology, where scientists tried to prove differences between races and track what they saw as the "degeneration" of Sweden's gene pool. Researchers also performed medical experiments on the Sami, who are indigenous to the region, from the 1920s to the 1950s.
In 2019, the Karolinska Institute apologized "unreservedly" for the 1873 grave exhumations, which were conducted by Gustaf Retzius, a leader in the field of "racial science," and his colleagues. (An activist group had requested the repatriation a year earlier.)
Today, the institute said, the exhumation methods would be "unethical or illegal."
"It wasn't a crime then, because there was no real jurisdiction," said Maria Josephson, a historian of science and medicine at Karolinska who works on archives and repatriations.
But, she said, "I think they also knew when they did it that they were in the absolute outskirts of what was a reasonable and morally OK thing to do."
For now, Palkane residents are grateful that their ancestors are, finally, allowed to rest again.
"People are pleased to see their bodies made whole again," said Jari Kemppainen, the local vicar before the ceremony, "in their home soil and in their home cemetery."