a blog by Peter Leonard
This weekend I went on a return trip to Bergen, on the west coast of Norway. I was last there in November 2007, as part of a conference in Migration and Ethnic Relations.
Every trip to Bergen has to include a visit to the Fish Market, which is sort of like the scene of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre for undersea life:
At the Bergenhus Fortress, you can see Håkon's Hall, a 13th-century royal building constructed by (who else?) Håkon Håkonsson.
Like any good medieval building, it's been destroyed and rebuilt any number of times, from catastrophic fires right after the initial construction to the most recent disaster, a Dutch munitions ship exploding in the harbor in 1944, setting the entire complex alight. Thusly the interior is mostly reconstructed, albeit on the model of authentic surviving models further north.
The lower floors, underneath the main hall, feature dramatic architectural vaulting:
The big tourist attraction in the city is the collection of Hanseatic buildings seen at the top of this post -- Bryggen, the Warf. Though these have also continuously been rebuilt through the ages, and though the fronts of the buildings themselves are mainly filled with touristy shops...
...the reconstruction itself has taken place with traditional materials and methods, and seen from the back the complex appears like a window into time:
On Sunday a bank of fog rolled into the bay, covering the buildings in a soft blanket of light grey:
