Bergen on Foot

Fisketorget. Fisk is fish, torg is a market square, and the tail on the end makes it THE fish market. You will notice the tail here is E T, not E N. Norwegian nouns come in two genders and they take different endings. Ignore that entirely. The rule still holds: the ending is the word THE. Now, this water. In 1349 a ship came in here from England, and Norway effectively ended. Get the story right, because the version you will hear is wrong. People will tell you a ghost ship drifted in crewed by corpses. The actual source, an Icelandic annal written within living memory, says something worse. The ship arrived. Cargo was unloaded and carried up into the city. And then the ship's company died, and then the townspeople began to die. Nobody drifted in dead. Bergen watched it happen, and by the time it understood what it was watching, the cargo was already ashore. Roughly sixty percent of everybody in Norway died. About sixty percent of the country's farms were simply abandoned, and were still abandoned a century and a half later. The Norwegian merchant class was gutted. The aristocracy was gutted. Royal administration collapsed so completely that the church could not collect its taxes. And now think about what you saw yesterday, up the quay. The Germans did not arrive because of the plague. They had been here a century already. But after 1349 there was nobody left with the money, the ships, or the authority to compete with them, or to regulate them. So say it like this, and no historian will argue with you. The plague did not bring the Germans to Bergen. It removed everyone who could have stopped them.

Domkirken. Dom is a cathedral, and you already know kirken. The Cathedral Church. And the district is Vågsbunnen, the bottom of the bay, because that is precisely where it sits. Now look up at the tower on the harbour side. About ten metres up, just left of the window. There is an iron cannonball in the wall. Every guide in Bergen will tell you an English warship fired that in during the Battle of Vågen in 1665, and it has been stuck there ever since. It is a lie, and it has been a lie for three hundred years. In 2017 a geologist and a building archaeologist examined it during repairs. The wall is soapstone. Soapstone is soft, but as the geologist put it, it is not chewing gum. An iron ball that hits it strikes and falls. It does not lodge. And when they looked closely, they found the ball sitting in a groove that had been deliberately carved to fit it, and set in mortar. Somebody cut a hole and cemented it in, probably in the 1700s. So it is not a battle scar. It is a monument disguised as an accident, and this city has been passing off the disguise ever since. Which makes it the most honest object in Bergen, because the battle it commemorates was itself a fraud. In 1665 a Dutch treasure fleet sheltered in this neutral harbour. The King of England and the King of Denmark and Norway secretly agreed that the English could attack it here, and the two kings would split the loot between them, personally. The order telling the Bergen garrison to stand aside did not arrive in time. So when the English opened fire, the Norwegian gunners on the fortress did the only thing soldiers can do when a foreign fleet starts shooting in their harbour. They shot back. And they won. Two kings agreed in secret to rob a third. The letter came late. So the men who had been sold, not knowing it, did their job.

This building was a Franciscan friary church. It only became the cathedral in 1537, and it got the job because the real cathedral had been demolished six years earlier. Kristkirken, Christ Church, stood up at the fortress. In 1531 the lord of Bergenhus levelled it to clear a field of fire. He was nicknamed the Church Breaker. And here is the part that matters. That demolition happened five years before the Reformation, and it was done with the consent of the sitting Catholic bishop. It was not a Protestant act. It was an engineering decision. Now, the Reformation itself. Norway did not have one, not in the way you have studied. There was no Wycliffe here, no Jan Hus, no Luther, no Hans Tausen, no Olaus Petri. There was no popular movement, and no reformer of any stature at all. Lutheranism was imposed from Copenhagen by decree in 1536 and 1537, and one Norwegian historian's line for how it actually reached the people is the truest sentence written about it: Lutheranism was sung into them. Slowly. And here is the proof, and it happened in this room. In December 1570, thirty-three years after Norway was officially Lutheran, the bishop had the saints' images taken down off the high altar of this cathedral. The reason was written down, in a diary, by a man standing about where you are: because some old women and old crones were still worshipping them. Thirty-three years in, and they were still praying to the statues. And when the bishop took them away, the city council of Bergen confronted him and boycotted church services until January. The people who went on strike over it were not Catholics. They were the Lutheran city fathers. That is what the Norwegian Reformation actually looked like on the ground. Remember the man with the diary. We will come back to him at the very end of this walk, and it will not be pleasant.

Korskirken. Kors is a cross, kirken is the church. The Cross Church, named for its floor plan. A quick stop, but do not skip it. This church was begun in the 1130s or 40s, which makes it possibly the oldest foundation in the city, older even than St. Mary's. It just kept burning, seven times over, so it kept none of its medieval fabric, while Mariakirken kept all of hers. And the cross shape you are looking at, the thing it is actually named for, is not medieval at all. The south arm went up in 1615 and the north arm in 1623. And in 2002 it stopped being a parish church. It is now run by the city mission as an open church for Bergen's poor and homeless. So you are looking at a building that has been continuously in use for nearly nine hundred years. It has been Catholic, then Lutheran, then a parish, and finally something like a shelter with a roof. Of everything on this walk, it is the only building still doing work that a twelfth-century founder would recognise as the job.

St. Jørgen's Hospital. Jørgen is simply the Norwegian for George, and leprosy houses all across medieval Europe were dedicated to Saint George. Now. Between 1850 and 1900, this city had three leprosy hospitals and the largest concentration of leprosy patients anywhere in Europe. Bergen did not study this disease from a distance. Bergen was the epicentre. And this hospital was not some medieval relic. It was still working in 1946, when the last two residents died here, each of them having lived inside these walls for more than fifty years. In 1873, in this city, a doctor named Gerhard Armauer Hansen identified the bacillus that causes leprosy. It was the first time in history that a bacterium was shown to cause a human disease, three years before Koch and anthrax. There is a statue of him in Bergen. Now here is what the statue does not say. On the third of November, 1879, Hansen took a cataract knife, and without telling her what he was doing, and without asking her permission, he inoculated leprous material from another patient's tumour underneath the surface of the eye of a thirty-three year old woman in his care. Her name was Kari Nielsdatter Spidsøen. He was trying to prove the disease was contagious by giving a second and worse form of it to a woman who already had the first. He admitted in court that he had not asked her, because he assumed she would say no. It hurt. She went to the hospital chaplain. The chaplain went to the law. And in 1880 the most famous doctor in Norway was tried in the Bergen city court and convicted of injuring a patient without cause and without consent. His defence, that the scientific question was of great national importance, was rejected. He was stripped of his post here. And then, in a political compromise, he was left in place as Chief Medical Officer for Leprosy for the whole of Norway, and went on to write the national laws that took leprosy patients from their families by force. He was convicted of experimenting on a patient without her consent, and they left him in charge of every leprosy patient in the country. Sixty-seven years before the Nuremberg Code, a patient in this building brought down the most celebrated physician in the nation. History gave him the statue and gave her nothing. Her name was Kari Nielsdatter Spidsøen. She was thirty-three.

Read the name on the map. Lungegårdsvannet. You know gård already, an estate. Vann is water, vannet is the water. So: the Lungegård Estate Water. And Lille and Store, on the two lakes, mean simply Little and Big. Now, who was Lungegård. There was a Benedictine convent in this city called Nonneseter, which means the Nuns' Seat, founded before 1130, the richest women's house in Norway. In 1528 the King of Denmark gave it away. He gave it, along with two hundred and seventy-two farms running up the coast, to a Danish nobleman named Vincens Lunge. It is probably the largest single grant any Norwegian king ever made to a private individual. Lunge took the nunnery, fortified it, and moved in. He called it Lungegården, his own estate, and the two lakes at the centre of Bergen have carried his name ever since. Note the date. 1528. Eight years before the Reformation. This was not a religious act, and Lunge was not a believer. Norway's own national encyclopaedia describes his motive as extreme self-interest, and treats his later support for the Lutheran king as purely instrumental. He is not the Reformation's conscience. He is its balance sheet. And that is the argument of this entire loop. In Bergen, Lutheran preaching arrived quietly, with German merchants, in the 1520s, and it broke nothing. The breaking was done by the Danish crown, for land and for money and for military advantage. It started before the theology arrived and it continued long after. Kristkirken, levelled in 1531 for a field of fire. Nonneseter, handed to a nobleman in 1528 as a consolation prize. And every time you look at a map of this city, you are reading the receipt.

Nykirken. Ny means new. The New Church. It was consecrated in 1621, which in this city counts as new construction. And you walked here along Strandgaten, the Shore Street, because it runs along the shore. These names are not mysteries. They are labels. Now, the church is here for what is underneath it. Bergen was never an archbishopric. The archbishop sat in Trondheim, up the coast. But from the 1300s he ran his commercial operations out of Bergen, and this is where his Bergen compound stood. It was fortified, and it was sixty metres long. Now hold that against a number from yesterday. Håkonshallen, the king's great hall, the grandest secular medieval building left standing in Norway, is thirty-seven metres long. The archbishop's counting house in Bergen was very nearly twice the size of the king's hall across the water. That is not a detail. That is the entire economic position of the late medieval Norwegian church, in one measurement. At the Reformation, the crown confiscated it. The buildings fell into ruin, and in 1618 the ruined north wing was handed to the townspeople of this side of the harbour so they could build themselves a church. They built this one, on top of it. About five hundred square metres of the archbishop's palace still survives underneath, excavated. So the burghers of Bergen put a Lutheran parish church directly onto the foundations of the richest churchman in the country, and the state kept the land. That is the Norwegian Reformation in one building.

Klosteret. Kloster is a monastery. Klosteret is THE monastery. An entire neighbourhood of Bergen is named THE MONASTERY, and there is no monastery. That is the stop. Munkeliv stood here, and the name means, literally, Monk Life. A Benedictine abbey founded before 1110, the richest monastery in Norway, holding land from the far south of the country out to Shetland and Orkney. And it was destroyed twice, by two completely different enemies, and you must not confuse them. In 1455 the royal castellan of Bergen, a Norwegian nobleman who had been preying on Hanseatic shipping, fled from the German merchants and took sanctuary inside the abbey. Around two thousand armed Germans came up this hill after him. They burned the monastery. They killed him. They killed the Bishop of Bergen. And they killed some sixty other people. That is the Kontor, the same men whose warm assembly rooms you stood in yesterday, storming a monastery, murdering a bishop, and getting away with it. And it has nothing whatever to do with the Reformation. It is eighty-one years too early. Then, in 1536, the Danish crown burned whatever was left, deliberately, with troops from the fortress, to deny the high ground of Nordnes to an enemy force. Nordnes, by the way. Nes is a headland. You are standing on the north headland. Also not iconoclasm. Also just war. And now look around you. There is no ruin. No foundation, no wall, no marked stone. It was excavated in 1860 and then deliberately buried again. What you are standing in is a very pretty neighbourhood of eighteenth and nineteenth century wooden houses, and the only thing left of the richest abbey in Norway is the name of the street. Klosteret. The Monastery. Stand still for a second and take the nothing seriously. It is the most honest monument in the city.

Heksesteinen. Heks is a witch. Stein is a stone. And you know the tail by now. The Witch Stone. You can read Norwegian street furniture now, and this is the last thing this walk is going to teach you, and it is the worst. On the seventh of April, 1590, a woman was burned alive at the execution ground on this headland. Her name was Anne Pedersdotter, which simply means Anne, the daughter of Peder. And she was the widow of Absalon Pederssøn Beyer. Remember him? The scholar with the diary, the man who sat in the cathedral in 1570 and wrote down what the bishop did to the images on the high altar. Twenty years after he recorded that, they burned his wife on this rock. She was accused of causing sickness and death by witchcraft. The man driving the accusation was a barber with a personal grudge. Her own maid was pressured into testifying against her. The sources say she cried out that she was innocent the whole way to the fire. And now the detail that should stay with you. Several of Bergen's priests protested. They tried to save her. The death sentence was sealed by thirty-seven men of the city's secular elite. The lawspeaker. The mayor. The council. The churchmen tried to stop it, and the businessmen killed her. Her case is generally credited with helping to set off the wider Norwegian witch hunt, which found its worst expression far to the north in Finnmark, where around ninety people were burned out of a tiny population. Bergen lit the fuse. Finnmark took the casualties. One correction, because the stone will mislead you. The inscription commemorates roughly three hundred and fifty people burned as a result of miscarriage of justice between 1550 and 1700. That is the figure for the whole of Norway, not for this city. Now walk back. It is about twenty-five minutes along the water to your hotel, and you have just walked the entire argument. The Germans brought Luther in quietly and kept their pictures on the wall. The state took the land, levelled the churches, wrote the laws, and lit the fires. And a woman burned on this rock for it.