Copenhagen trip report

[lethargic_man]

The other week, aviva_m and I went for a long weekend in Copenhagen. I'm not going to blog about everything I saw, experienced and learned there (I'm not even going to mention (apart from here) Denmark's largest tourist attraction, the autonomous anarchist settlement Christiania, or the Little Mermaid statue); but here's a few highlights for you.

Probably the thing which stood out the most from the walking tour of the city centre we went on was how Copenhagen, being traditionally built out of wood, has burned down numerous times. When we visited Christiansborg Palace, we learned that that was in fact the third palace on the site, the first two having burned down. You'd have thought they'd have learned a bit of fire safety over time, and indeed the second palace was equipped with fire buckets and the like; but the reason it too burned down was because (the firemen were not told about the network of tunnels under the palace which would have enabled them to move around it faster and because) the firemen were not allowed into the Great Hall, because the floor had just been polished. Good grief.

We also learned some more fun facts in the free one-hour tour of the National Museum, such as the case of the farmer a hundred years ago who was cutting peat and discovered a bog body. There had been a search for a missing person recently, and he reported to the police, "I think I've found Nils." Er, no, said the doctor the police sent; this body is a woman's. And it's thousands of years old. We'd better send it to Copenhagen. But the farmer's wife didn't think it was respectful to send a body to Copenhagen in dirty clothes, so she washed the thousands-of-years-old tartan garment the corpse was wearing; astonishingly, it was in good enough condition to survive this undamaged.

A similar story accompanies the Trundholm sun chariot, a Bronze Age gilded solar disk drawn by a horse, which was dug up in 1902 by a farmer and given to his children to play with as a toy before anyone realised this was an object of cultural significance.

Photo Credit: National Museum of Denmark

Here's something else which amused me. At the time Denmark converted to Christianity under King Harald Bluetooth (famed for introducing wifi to the Vikings), pagans reacted to the trend among Christians for publically displaying their religious affiliation by wearing crosses, by starting themselves to wear Thor's hammer pendants. The jewellers of the city, though, rather than being partisan in the matter, were happy to take cash from adherents of both sides, as is shown by this mould used for casting pendants of both crosses and Thor's hammers.

Photo Credit: National Museum of Denmark

It's well-known that the Vikings are associated with horned helmets. It's also quite well-known that they did not wear such horned helmets themselves. However, here are some quite impressive horned helmets from the Bronze Age, a thousand years and more before the Viking era:

Photo Credit: National Museum of Denmark

I was surprised to learn that Copenhagen is the world's cycling capital, and that, bucking the trend everywhere else, car usage in Copenhagen is actually lower this year than last year. Unfortunately the result of this is that one has to put up with "Viking biking"...

At the Jewish museum, we read about the "miracle rescue" of Danish Jews from the Nazis, about which I have already blogged notes from a talk at Limmud (and elsewhere in the city we saw the bullet holes in the side of a guardhouse outside Amalienborg Palace from the Nazi invasion); what felt odd about the history of the Jews in Denmark is that it only goes back to the mid-eighteenth century—especially so when Jews had been in Germany to the south for almost a millennium by that point.

Here's a quaint little oddity from elsewhere in the museum for your amusement: a cigar case in the shape of the Ark of the Covenant: