Steilneset Memorial

On a bare, wind-scoured shore at the edge of Vardø, Norway's easternmost town, two strange buildings stand side by side. One is a long, slender wooden frame stretched over the grass like a drying rack for fish, holding a pale fabric cocoon; the other is a square pavilion of dark glass and weathering steel. Together they form the Steilneset Memorial, a monument to the 91 people executed for witchcraft in Finnmark in the seventeenth century, and the last major work of the artist Louise Bourgeois.

The memorial confronts one of the darkest chapters of Norwegian history. Finnmark saw more accusations of witchcraft than any other part of Norway, and a far higher share of executions; in a series of mass trials, most of them held at Vardø, beginning in 1621 and peaking in 1662–1663, 77 women and girls and 14 men were put to death, most of them burned at the stake. Confessions were extracted under torture. The memorial stands on the shore at Steilneset, where the condemned are believed to have been burned.

The monument was commissioned jointly by the town, the county, the Varanger Museum and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration as part of the National Tourist Routes programme, and was designed by Bourgeois together with the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, winner of the Pritzker Prize. Work began in 2006, and Queen Sonja opened the memorial on 23 June 2011, a year after Bourgeois's death. Zumthor's hall is about 125 metres long; inside, a narrow timber walkway runs past 91 small windows placed at irregular intervals, each lit by a single bulb and paired with a text, drawn from the trial records, about one of the condemned. Bourgeois's pavilion, The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved, holds a metal chair with flames rising through its seat, reflected in a ring of oval mirrors that stand around it like judges.

Vardø itself lies on the small island of Vardøya off the tip of the Varanger Peninsula, facing the Barents Sea, and is home to Vardøhus, the fortress where the witch trials were held.

Getting there

The memorial stands in the town of Vardø. The nearest airport is Vardø Airport, Svartnes (VAW), about 2.4 km away on the mainland side of the strait. Vardøya is linked to the mainland by the Vardø Tunnel, a subsea road tunnel on the European route E75 that opened in 1982 as the first of its kind in Norway.