Stone church. Rovaniemi church with its altar wall fresco and the adjacent cemetery with hero graves is the most moving symbol of the destruction and reconstruction of Lapland's administrative centre. The brick and concrete church building is in the form of a long church with an end tower. The outer walls are roughcast and the roof is of copper. The church hall is covered by a folded concrete vault clad with narrow planks. On the long sides there are corridors pierced by diagonal wall pilasters. The rear wall of the choir is covered by Lennart Segerståle's fresco named The Source of Life. In addition, the church contains Antti Salmenlinna's Bible-themed stained glass and decorative paintings, into which Lapland-themed details have been incorporated. East of the church is the congregation's oldest cemetery surrounded by a stone wall, containing a civil war hero statue and memorials to the earlier churches and bell tower. North of the church there is a second cemetery consecrated in 1833 as well as a hero grave area for 603 soldiers who fell in the Winter, Continuation, and Lapland Wars. Väinö Aaltonen's hero statue "A Man's Fate on a Mountain Summit" was unveiled in 1954. The area also has a 1965 memorial (Ensio Seppänen) for Rovaniemi residents who died in exile in Sweden in 1944–1946.
Official description (Museovirasto) — machine-translated from Finnish
The Rovaniemi Mother Church is a church located in the city center of Rovaniemi in Lapland, Finland. The 850-seat church, designed by architect Bertel Liljequist, was completed in 1950. The earlier church building, completed in 1817, was burnt down by the Germans during the Lapland War on October 16, 1944.