9140 The tympanum carving over the door of the Borgund Church in Sunnmøre, an outdoor folk museum. Serpent and the apple tree.
9145 This is the Borgund Church. You can see some of the headstones in the graveyard.
9162 A typical farmhouse in historic Norway. It’s a newer design than the one we went into, you can tell by the chimney.
9176 A old Norwegian barn. Not so different from my grandmother’s barn but then they were probably built around the same time. Her farmhouse was colonial, built prior to 1776 and the bard was almost that old but was a three story structure. Not a nail in it, all tongue and groove and pegs. Same color too.
9170 These small houses were typical of the period for workers. These were built to house the people brought in to build the church and are across the road from it.
9179 A replica of a small Viking boat, built for travel in the fjords and around the coast, not the open sea
July 17 – Ålesund, Norway. Ålesund (pronounced Oo’-le-sund, at least that’s how it sounded to my ear. The Å must be pronounced like the oo in food and they hit it hard.) is a fair size sit at about 43,000 residents. It’s another city that has benefited greatly from the North Sea oil fields. One of the things the city is famous for was the result of a catastrophe in the early 1900s but we’ll get to that later. We’re visiting on another cloudy, breezy, rainy day.
There’s a legend seems likely to have the truth at its core that connects Norway with Western Europe. There was a man, born near Ålesund, who was so large and strong that no horse could carry him. He became known as Gangerolf (Walking Rolf) because he had to walk everywhere. Outside Norway he is better known as Rollo. The people and the rulers of the area were afraid of him and eventually he was banished from Norway ostensibly for bad behavior but, based on his later exploits, it seems that paranoia was more likely the cause.
Gangerolf apparently left without much protest and headed to France. With is size and strength he quickly became the leader of a band of Norsemen there and after an unsuccessful attack on Paris and a treaty with King Charles, he settled in the northern area of France and was given land in the treaty that eventually became the Principality of Normandy. He swore fidelity to King Charles in the treaty and lived up to that pretty well, but when Charles was deposed he considered that oath to be expired and saw himself as an independent ruler of Normandy.
Gangerolf was born in 846 and his baptismal name was Robert given at his baptism after his conversion to Christianity. He died in 931. After the Norman conquest of England in 1066 his descendants were kings of that nation also. He’s the great-great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror. Through William, Gangerolf is an ancestor of the present-day British royal family, as well as an ancestor of all current European monarchs and many abolished European kingdoms. DNA has been taken from the remains of his grandson Richard I and great-grandson Richard II to try to fill in the background of this important Viking warrior.
Just a side note about William I (aka William the Conqueror or William the Bastard. Just goes to show that you can’t please everyone. For example, the man we know as Sir Francis Drake is known in the Spanish, especially the Caribbean and South America, world as the dastardly pirate Drake.) He ruled both England and Normandy but was beset by problems consolidating his rule and with his eldest son. He defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings and was crowned King of England on Christmas day 1066. His reign was marked by several unsuccessful rebellions and he died in France.
Back to Gangerolf, there are three statues of him around the world, one is here in Ålesund, one is in Rouen, France and the other is in Fargo, North Dakota. Fargo, you say! Yikes. OK, enough about ancient history. I put these notes in my journal so I’ll remember then later.
The Ålesund Fire of January 23, 1904 was one of the most terrible disasters of any Norwegian town. Constructed mostly of wood, almost the whold town was destroyed because gale force winds whipped the fire into an inferno so quickly the firemen were helpless to intervene. The people had to leave the town in the middle of the night with very little warning. One person died an elderly lady who was out of her home but went back in to save some ‘treasured possession’ and did not come back out. Ultimately over 10,000 people were left homeless.
Oddly enough, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany who vacationed up here on occasion sent four ships with material enough to build temporary housing for the townsfolk. In four years the town had been rebuilt in the style of the period, Art Nouveau. As a result the town center has an unusually high percentage of buildings of the same period. Since the new construction rules forbade using wooden construction in downtown, these buildings are still in great condition.
Ålesund is the prominent fishing port in Norway. The fishing fleet is one of the most modern in Europe. Ålesund is also furniture center. With the fishing center, important shipbuilding and nautical equipment industries also developed. Since late 1990s these industries have been serving the offshore oil industry. When the oil rush started many fishing boats were converted to serve that endeavor. Later they started building purpose designed offshore vessels at local shipyards to serve the North Sea oil industry. This has become an important industry in and around Ålesund.
Ok, that’s enough history, now to the travel. Today we are heading out of town to Sunnmøre, an outdoor folk museum. They have a comprehensive collection of old buildings from around Norway. We were dropped off at the Borgund Church on one side of the museum and we will walk from there to the indoor boat museum and the visitor center on the opposite side.
The church is one of the few non-wooden structures in the museum. It may be wood underneath but it has stucco or plaster exterior with wooden trim and steeple. It also has a tile roof. The wood parts of the structure are a beautiful, rich brown, almost mahogany. It has a very interesting carving on the tympanum over the main entrance, a serpent entwined around an apple tree. I’m sure it’s purpose was to remind the congregants of the temptations they’ve faced during the week and their need for repentance. A clue that evil sometimes hides behind beauty.
The church has a graveyard that showed us a tradition of Norway. Some people place small granite birds atop the tombstones as a symbol of the resurrection to come; a reminder that God watches out for the sparrow, how much more will He look after His children. The cute little birds are also very aesthetically pleasing.
Our guide took us into one of the wooden farmhouses and gave us some detail about daily life on a farm in the area. Not so different from the life on my grandmother’s farm in the 1950s while I was growing up. We had a shorter winter and longer growing season. They can’t really grow wheat in Norway and that’s why, traditionally, they don’t have much bread. They can grow other grains but without at least some wheat it’s hard to make bread that holds together. Consequently their starch was mostly porridge made from other grains. Every couple of years by grandmother would put the upper fields in summer wheat on our farm. It grew very successfully there.
The houses were small by our standards. Most only had a living room, kitchen/dining area, a large work room and small office area where the accounts and other records were kept. Sleeping areas where made in the living area at night. Traditionally there was no second floor as the traditional way to let smoke out of the house from fireplaces and oil lamps was to put a vent that could be opened at the peak of the roof, no chimneys. A second floor would not let that work. Also a second floor made the house too hard to heat in the long winter. The barn was always the largest building the farmer had. Like Pennsylvania they were painted red and for the same reason, red paint was the least expensive color and it was good enough for the barn, but not the house. Apparently my Pennsylvania German ancestors had a lot in common with the Norse. It rained petty consistently while we were visiting but it waited to pour until we were indoors at the boat display. That was nice.
We finished up in the boat museum. The first part was actual Norwegian boats of various styles from personal craft to fishing boats. The second room was filled with replicas of ancient Viking boats. After some time for shopping we drove downtown for a tour of the city. We started out at a hotel on a hill with a viewpoint over the harbor and the old part of town.
The view was very nice despite the weather. Later we headed across the fjord to head to a viewpoint for a look across at the ship and the city. Then it was back to the ship for lunch and then embarked on a walk around the old city.
It was still raining lightly but it was not so bad as to dissuade us from going. After a false start made by crossing a short bridge we shouldn’t have and winding up on the wrong side of a canal, we got on track and found the Art Nouveau section of town and the pedestrian street. The buildings are pretty but the main attraction is the consistency of the architecture. I’ve never seen anything like it. Art Nouveau uses natural designs from nature, plants for example, to decorate their buildings. The buildings themselves are usually very straight forward but classically simple, straight lines with some curves, arches or turrets. I like it.
We walked down by the waterfront where there’s a small decommissioned lighthouse. A hotel got permission to use it as a honeymoon suite and it has been very successful. You have to reserve it a long time in the future. The buildings along the waterfront that were originally used as warehouses are now hotels and shops. They’ve painted a mural of a man hoisting a large box of fish up to the top of the warehouse. We stopped in on the shopping mall next to the City Hall. Diana bought and wrote some post cards and I got some stamps. Problem was no one knew where we could mail them so Diana went into city hall and someone in there agreed to mail them for us.
Another wet day of touring but fun nonetheless. Tomorrow our last stop of the cruise in Bergen.
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