A great fire and a prominent role in the WW2 Resistance
By Eileen Ogintz
The entire city center burned in a matter of hours and thousands were left homeless.
No, not Chicago in 1871. It was here in Alesund, Norway, in 1904.
We are in Alesund on a Peninsula below Mount Aksla. The mountain views are fantastic! One Saturday night in January 1904, a fire started in a factory at 2 a.m. and by the next day, some 850 wooden houses and buildings had burned. Miraculously, of the 12,000 town residents, only one woman died. “And she lived next to the firehouse,” said our guide Per Giskeorlegaard, who took us on a walking tour during the few short hours of daylight we have here near the Arctic Circle.
We are traveling north on the Hurtigruten MS Trollfjord up the Coast of Norway, ultimately to see the Northern Lights well above the Arctic Circle. The company promises if you can’t see them, you will get another trip. But this winter is supposed to be the best viewing experience in years because the 11-year solar cycle is at its peak, so we aren’t worried.
Our guide explained that the city was rebuilt in an astonishingly fast three years, in part thanks to German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Best known for starting World War I, the Kaiser apparently was a huge fan of salmon fishing in this region. When he heard about the fire, he deployed ships with building materials. “That was a tremendous help,” said Giskeorlegard.
What’s special about this city, now home to 55,000—15,000 in the city center—was the young architects employed to rebuild the city in 1904. They argued for it to be built in the art Nouveau style popular in Berlin and Vienna where they had studied. There are rounded towers, carved flowers, asymmetry, and a general reaction against 19th Century architecture. However, as this is Norway, some of the designs on the outside of the buildings reflect Norwegian culture—Viking masks, dragons, and Celtic symbols. The buildings are charming.
I love that Hurtigruten works only with local tour companies, so the guides clearly know their city. And in case you don’t want to opt for a tour, we get a handout with high points and a recommended walk. Some hardy hikers from the ship opted to climb up Aksla Mountain, 418 steps to the top, famous for the views from the top.
Alesund also played a large role in World War II history with brave locals operating the “Shetland Bus,” taking many of those fleeing the Nazis to the Shetland Islands, from where they could go on to Scotland. The penalty for fleeing or helping those escape was death and there is a monument to those who left. More than 300 died and 75 were caught and killed. Some 500 returned as soldiers.
There is also a statue memorializing Joachim Renneberg, a native from Alesund, who was among those who successfully led the attack on the Nazi Heavy Water Factory of Vemork, one of the most important and successful allied sabotage missions during the water. The Nazis were producing heavy water that they hoped to use in their atomic bomb development, though that never came to fruition. Incredibly, all of the 10 commandos escaped, some skiing in subzero temperatures to Sweden. The story became a popular film starring Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris and other A-Listers, “Heros of Telemark,” made in 1965.
Back on board, we were again immersed in Norwegian culture as lunch included smoked seafood, the ancient method of food preservation (fishing for cod and then salting for export is a big business here). Some dishes were cooked in beer (our last stop on the walk was to Mono, a microbrewery). An afternoon talk was about the different fish from here — cod, salmon, halibut, shrimp, and King Crab as well as seaweed and kelp. Popular dishes include Bacalao, a tomato-based fish soup with cod, potatoes, and black olives; Rekesmorbrod, an open sandwich piled high with shrimp salad; and Fiske pudding, a kind of fishcakes made with white fish and served with a white sauce. I’m sure there will be opportunities to taste some of these on board.
There has been a beer-brewing culture in Norway forever, even a giant Norse god of beer and brewing.
Trolls as well. “But the real ones weren’t cute like the ones in the souvenir shops,” our guide told us. “They were mean and would capture you and take you to their mountain caves, never to return.” Bedtime stories, he said, were designed to encourage children to behave…or else.
The modern versions are awfully cute, though.
Then at our next stop in Bronnoysund, there was the poor spurned troll. He was so angry that he fired an arrow at his would-be lover after she rejected him, thus the hole in the middle of Torghatten Mountain. But as the legend goes, a Troll king blocked the arrow, the mountain his fossilized hat.
More Troll tales to come as we travel farther north.
In Bronnoysund, a town of 5,000 people that is exactly in the middle of Norway or as locals joke, “the middle of nowhere.” The first order of business is loading a large locally cut Christmas Tree onto the ship. We visited an old fish and meat smoking facility, and were treated to an excellent organ concert in Bronnoy Church, the oldest building in town first built in the 12th Century. After several fires from lightning strikes, it has been mainly rebuilt in stone.
We passed the so-called “Love Bridge,” that once was the dividing point between the northern and southern parts of the city. Once upon a time, the bridge was the place two young men would square off to battle for a girl’s heart.
This archipelago, incidentally, boasts some 10,000 small islands where many people had homes. But due to the high cost of heating and maintaining, and transportation to and from the homes (by boat), today those homes are used mainly for holidays.