Bryggen i Bergen, Norway

Poised at the convergence of Norway’s majestic western fjords and the wild, blue Atlantic ocean, Bergen, Norway’s “second city,” is straight out of a fairytale. Along with this moniker, Bergen boasts many other names: UNESCO World Heritage City, Gateway to the Western Fjords, and “Arendelle” from Disney’s Frozen.

Bergen sits at the end (or at the beginning) of a gloriously scenic seven-hour train ride from Oslo, Norway’s lively capital city. We were halfway through our summer trip to Norway when Matt and I disembarked the train into a cold, wet Bergen afternoon.

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Bryggen

While the fjords surrounding the city certainly give Bergen its allure, it is the city’s Hanseatic history that shapes its culture today. If I were to send you a postcard from Bergen, I’d most likely choose a card with these buildings pictured on the front:

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This colorful row of buildings is Bryggen (“dock” or “pier” in Norwegian), the famous UNESCO World Heritage Site lined up along the Vågen harbor. Bergen was Norway’s capital city in the 12th and 13th centuries. From 1350 to 1754, a group of German merchants known as the Hanseatic League dominated the trade in Scandinavia and parts of Europe. In 1350, the Hanseats established an office in Bergen and began to develop the wharfs and docks by the sea.

In 1550, the 2,000 German Hanseats controlled Bergen from within Bryggen’s walls–despite the 8,000 Norwegians that lived outside the wharf. The Hanseats filled their warehouses with stockfish from northern Norway and ran successful trade routes all over the world. Today, Bergen wears its maritime history proudly.

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Strolling along the brightly-colored facades of Bryggen is itself an experience, but the real treasure lies within. Behind its wooden walls lies a maze of stores, boutiques, shops, and cafes, boasting everything from reindeer hides to fine art to wool mittens to troll statues. With the wooden floorboards creaking under our feet and dimly-lit passageways leading in and out of a jumble of ramshackle rooms, it was almost easy to imagine ourselves as humble merchants enjoying a warm reprieve from a long, Nordic night.

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The most special place we saw was the shop pictured below. When Matt was in college, he visited Bergen on a weekend trip from Ireland, and purchased a painting from this store, Kvams Flisespikkeri. Almost eight years later, Matt returned to the store with me and we purchased an original piece from the artist, Ketil Kvam. He makes colorful woodblock prints featuring the famous Bergen row houses, Viking ships navigating the fjords, and other scenes from Nordic life.

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Today, Bryggen’s red, yellow, and brown warehouses are famous for their bright colors; however, during a tour of Bryggen, we learned that these buildings were originally all painted black. Since many merchants and traders could not read at the time, the buildings bore huge metal adornments such as elk heads to help people find certain stores.

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The Hanseatic Museum and Schøtstuene

The most enjoyable way to understand Bryggen is to take a tour of the Hanseatic Museum and Schøtstuene. The museum offers 90-minute tours in a number of different languages at only $15/person. When we visited in June 2019, the museum was undergoing a renovation to salvage the buildings, which are so old that they are beginning to sink into the earth. For this reason, tours of Bryggen right now only include a walk around Bryggen and a visit to the Schøtstuene, or “meeting house.”

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As you can imagine, the wooden structures of Bryggen were prone to fires, and there were several over the decades that razed the entire town to the ground; for this reason, the schøtstue was the only heated room with a fireplace, and thus became a natural meeting place for cold Hanseats.

Normally, the tour also includes a visit to a traditional Hanseat warehouse and sleeping quarters. On our tour, we learned about Hanseat labor laws, eating habits, sleeping arrangements, trading routes, education, and relationships. We even got to try the marzipan that Hanseats ate to cure stomachaches!

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The Norwegian Fisheries Museum

After our tour of Schøtstuene, a shuttle bus took us to the Norwegian Fisheries Museum, where we learned about the history of the whaling industry, overfishing herring and cod in Nordic waters, and sustainable fishing efforts today. This tour and the transportation were included in the price of our ticket to the Hanseatic Museum.

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The museum was quite small and we only took about half an hour to tour everything; one of the most enjoyable parts was speaking with one of the museum directors, a native Norwegian who told us that if he could visit anywhere in the world, he’d come to Nashville for the country music scene! It’s funny to think about how our city has made such an international impression.

Despite its infamously bleak weather (it rains almost every day in this coastal town), Bergen is full of color, history, and magic, and Bryggen stands at the center of all of this. It’s truly amazing to see how people lived and worked in medieval times in Norway and to experience part of that in modern times.