Description : Ulvila (Swedish: Ulvsby) is a town and municipality of Finland. It is one of the six medieval cities of Finland, as well as the third oldest in the country. Its position as city it had since the 14th century, was taken over by Pori in the 16th century. The inhabited parts of Ulvila belong largely to the low-lying and flat valley of the Kokemäenjoki, so that the uplifting of the land played a major role at this point. There are signs of habitation by hunters and sealers from the Neolithic Age. The agricultural settlement began in the Bronze Age, when the fertile plains were built. These residents left heap graves behind. The settlement at that time was apparently permanent and consisted of individual houses. Settlement may have decreased during the Iron Age. No graves from the first centuries of our era have been found in Ulvila, so that a disappearance of the population for about a millennium cannot be ruled out. During this time, the silting up of the bay in Ulvila at the time continued, and the Kokemäenjoki brought clayey earth into the area of today's villages Friitala and Vanhakylä, which, however, was apparently too viscous to process with the techniques of the time. The next known settlement was then upstream in Kokemäki . With the improvement of agricultural methods at the beginning of the second millennium, settlement spread to Ulvila, where the village of Haistila was first established around the 13th century. Sometime between the 12th and 14th centuries, a trading post was built at the mouth of the river, which replaced the markets further upstream. Middle Ages By the 16th century, all the villages of today's Ulvilas had emerged. In the 13th century, a chapel of the parish of Kokemäki was built in the area of Liikistö, which later probably became an independent parish. Later the church was moved to the place of the current church in the village of Ulvila (today Vanhakylä, "old village"). At this time, the name of the parish was also changed. While Haistila was a Finnish-speaking village from the start, the later villages emerged as a result of Swedish settlement. One possible contributing factor to the interest of Swedish settlers in this part of the coast was the ownership rights of the Bishop of Turku to the fishing grounds and banks of Liikistö and Anola. The area was probably administered by Swedish tenants. However, as early as the 15th century, the villages began to turn to the Finnish language, as can be seen from the contemporary names. The town of Ulvila was established in the first half of the 14th century on the site of the old trading post. The citizens of Ulvila were referred to as townspeople as early as 1344, but the Swedish King Albrecht of Mecklenburg Ulvila only granted formal town charter on February 7, 1365 . Kokemäki's trading rights were transferred to Ulvila in the 1440s. The development of Ulvila stood in the way, however, that the city did not receive the stacking rights , which was a prerequisite for trade with foreign countries. So trade could only be with Stockholmand Turku. It was not until the end of the 15th century that Ulvila was granted free sailing rights, but its use remained limited due to the warlike unrest of the time. The only medieval building in Ulvila, the Church of St. Olaf, was built on the current site in the 14th century. It is unclear whether today's church is this church of origin, as on the one hand dendrochronological studies date the church to the 1480s, on the other hand coins from the 14th century were found in the foundation walls.
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