Bryggen

Interesting facts

During the Second World War the German Reichskommissar Josef Terboven wanted Bryggen demolished, partly because its maze of passages could hide resistance fighters.

A huge ship explosion in the harbour on 20 April 1944 literally lifted the wooden houses and dropped them again, so jacks were needed to straighten them.

After the 1944 blast, about 8,000 square metres of torn-off roofs were temporarily covered with cheap fibre boards that went soggy in the rain but saved the buildings.

The Hanseatic community here was an all-male world: women were barred from the wharf and the merchants' employees were forbidden to marry.

Despite the marriage ban, wills preserved in Lübeck's archives show returning merchants naming the mistresses and children they had left behind in Bergen.

Boys arrived as apprentices, became dockhands after three or four years, and could rise to journeyman only after passing an exam in trade, goods and arithmetic.

The original shoreline ran 100 to 150 metres inland of today's quay; the merchants gradually pushed their plots out into the harbour on timber foundations.

Those foundations were log cribs, assembled on land, sunk between wooden piles and filled with gravel and stone to carry the buildings above.

For centuries the quarter was called Tyskebryggen, the German Wharf, until Bergen's city council officially renamed it simply Bryggen on 25 May 1945.

The World Heritage area holds 61 protected buildings, and a foundation set up in 1962 owns 36 of them and keeps its own team of traditional carpenters.

Why it is worth it

A row of steep-gabled wooden houses, painted ochre, red and white, lines the eastern side of Bergen's harbour, and behind the façades narrow passages run back between leaning timber walls, galleries and stairs. Bryggen — simply "the wharf" in Norwegian — preserves the shape of a medieval merchant quarter that once tied western Norway into the trading network of northern Europe.

Bergen was founded in the eleventh century, and the first piers on this shore were built around 1100. In about 1350 the Hanseatic League established one of its four principal foreign offices, or kontors, here, and for four centuries German merchants traded stockfish — cod dried in the open air — in exchange for grain. They lived and worked in long parallel tenements that ran from the waterfront back towards the hillside, each a cluster of storehouses, offices and sleeping lofts around a shared passage. Fire was the constant enemy: the quarter burned repeatedly and was rebuilt each time on the old plots in the old manner, so the layout is medieval even where the timber is not. Most of what stands today went up after the great fire of 1702, while some stone cellars go back to the fifteenth century. The Hanseatic presence came to an end in 1754, when the properties passed into Norwegian hands.

Another fire in 1955 destroyed part of the row, and the excavations that followed, lasting thirteen years, uncovered some 670 runic inscriptions, mostly cut into pieces of wood and bone — ownership tags, business letters, Latin prayers, charms and love notes from the Middle Ages that changed what was known about everyday literacy in medieval Scandinavia. The Bryggens Museum, opened in 1976 on the cleared site, displays these finds above the foundations of the oldest buildings, and the Hanseatic Museum and the assembly rooms of Schøtstuene show how the merchants lived. Bryggen was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979.

Getting there

Bryggen lies on the Vågen harbour in central Bergen, about 0.5 km from the city centre. Bergen Airport, Flesland (BGO) is about 13 km away. Bergen railway station, the terminus of the Bergen Line from Oslo, is a short walk away.

Bryggen

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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