The Sámi NorthFebruary
Jokkmokk Winter Market
Every February since 1605
It has run in the first week of February since 1605, when the Crown fixed a market and a church meeting on the same dates to get taxes, trade and baptisms done in one journey. Four hundred years later the dates have barely moved.
It is first a working Sámi gathering and second a thing visitors may attend, and that order is the whole character of it. Business gets done. People who see each other once a year see each other. There is a reindeer race on the river ice and a great deal of standing about in minus thirty.
The market runs across the town — hides and antler, knives, silver, root baskets, and a quantity of food eaten standing up in the cold.