Oslo: Ships, Stave Churches, & Sod Roofs

 Hello again, Blogonauts!

Still in Oslo on Thursday, we ferried from the main harbor to the peninsula known inexplicably as "Museum Island." We ignored the geographic misnomer and, upon disembarking, set out to explore a couple of the collected of museums. 

We started out with the Maritime Museum, which via art, models, artifacts, and narrative exhibits, covers centuries of life on the sea. On display was the oldest boat ever found in Norway, a dugout canoe found submerged in a bog. Also were several examples of smaller viking vessels, as well as fishing boats of varying sizes.

Oslo's Harbor from Museum Island

Viking Boat buried about 900 AD. (Sorry about the glare.)

A "Rudder Head," a heavy weight atop the rudder to help keep it in position.

Cabin on a fishing
 
Display of Norwegian fishing boats. They look only marginally seaworthy.

From there we made our way through a drippy drizzle to the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. Rather than exhibits contained within a building or two, the Museum's vast acreage contains 160 culturally relevant buildings that were relocated to the site, including a stave church (originally built in 1200 AD), a demonstration farm with various sod-roofed houses, barns, and storage buildings, and additional buildings from the 20th century.

Gol Stave Church, built around 1200 AD.

Church altar with original painted backdrop





Buildings relocated here and used for the demonstration farm


Norwegian horse with a punk haircut

One aspect that was hard to photograph was the vast destruction of family homes & communities during the Nazi occupation (1940-1945). Rebuilding houses and repatriating those who had been transported by the Nazis from Norway was a massive project. As the century moved ahead, there were some additional buildings helped to document homes, businesses, and life in general.

This could just as well have been a US mid-century filling station

So next we depart Oslo for Bergen. Wish us luck! The weather forecast is a bit damp.

Blog to you later!



Location: Oslo, Norway

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Please leave some indication of who you are, either by name or a known alias. :-)

Popular posts from this blog

Serfdom to Soviets: Estonian Farms

Image
  An Estonian serf family home, circa 1800. Hello again, Blogonauts! We haven't left Tallinn, but we have slipped momentarily away from the city center. Today I spent much of the day wandering the grounds of the Eesti Vabaõhumuuseum. (Say that 3 times fast! Heck, say it even once slowly!). Rest easy... I'll save you the trouble. That particular bowl of alphabet soup translates into the Estonian Open-Air Museum . It's a luscious mixture of woods and fields nestled alongside Tallinn's bay, and this vast park holds dozens of relocated farm buildings from many parts of Estonia (and covers many eras of its agricultural history). But this is no haphazard collection. Each set of buildings has been curated to show how a farm family would have lived over the last 300 years. (The exhibits even carry visitors forth through the era of Soviet collective farming.) Let's highlight a few. The building above dates from the early 1800s and served as both the family's primary home...
Read more

I'm Tallinn for Estonia!

Image
  A portion of Tallinn's old town skyline Hello again, Blogonauts! Let me invite you to join me in the small country of Estonia, and its capital, Tallinn. So where are we? As you may know, three former USSR states (Lithuania, Latvia, & Estonia) edge the Baltic Sea. Estonia is the northernmost of that trio. I joined a 2-hour group walking tour today to see much of the old town. In a way, I'm channeling the tour guide (a Londoner now married to an Estonian) to give some of the stories that help to explain the pictures.  So back to those stories: While Estonian culture is centuries old, the Danes, the Swedes, the Germans, & the Russians have each fought to rule over this land. Estonia's existence as an independent country is therefore relatively modern...really only around 100 years, with an enormous Nazi-&-Soviet-filled gap in the middle. The skyline photo above, though, points to medieval history. Stone parapets, medieval towers, earthen ramparts, and even the re...
Read more

Finagling Finland

Image
  This little tugboat carried me & a thousand companions from Tallinn to Helsinki Hello again, Blogonauts! Oh, the headlines I considered for this post!    Beginning With A Big "Finnish"    Hell not floatie, Hell sinkie!    This Is Another Finn Mess I've Gotten Myself Into! So you can thank me that I spared you the pain of those puns (...or did I?). At noon on Monday the bedazzled barge "Finlandia" embarked across the Baltic, baring me and bundles of vagabonds bound for the cloudy, windswept harbor known as Helsinki. I had worried a bit about becoming seasick, but that was never a threat. Instead I whiled away the time planning my 3-day Finnish foray while pretending I was eating at the cafe in IKEA. I'm sure I've eaten something similar in IKEA's cafeteria.   I trammed & toddled my way to my hotel. But then, time and daylight were wasting! After quickly stowing my luggage in my room, it was my moment to orient myself to the...
Read more