Welcome to Bryggen. These colourful wooden buildings leaning against each other along the harbour are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In fact, this was one of Norway's first two entries, alongside the Urnes Stave Church. What you're looking at is the surviving front of the old Hanseatic wharf, where German merchants stored, traded, and controlled the stockfish that made Bergen rich. The current buildings were rebuilt after the great fire I told you about. Interestingly, they were built on the same medieval foundations using the same techniques. As I mentioned earlier, Bergen has been devastated by fire over several centuries. After a fire in the mid-twentieth century, archaeologists moved in and uncovered something astonishing. They found more than three hundred thousand medieval objects, and six hundred and seventy runic inscriptions on wood and bone, described as ""the most important runic find of the twentieth century."" Interestingly, these runes aren't formal inscriptions or royal decrees. They're the everyday scribbles of ordinary people. One inscription reads, “Ást min, kyss mik” — “My darling, kiss me.” Another simply says, “Gyða tells you to go home.” One carving even invokes Thor and Odin, showing that old pagan beliefs lingered long after Christianity had arrived. In another, you find a mix of cultures: a Norse love poem alongside a line from Virgil—“Omnia vincit amor,” meaning “love conquers all.” Someone here was clearly familiar with both local traditions and classical Latin literature, carving both into wood. There’s also a more secretive message—once hidden under wax—urging someone to switch sides during a twelfth-century civil war. And then, of course, there are a few inscriptions that are… let’s just say, not quite suitable for polite company. These runes proved that the runic alphabet was still in daily use in the fourteenth century, much later than scholars had previously believed. Before the finding of these inscriptions, there was doubt whether the runes were ever used for anything else other than inscriptions of names and solemn phrases. This showed the everyday use that runes had here. Here’s another interesting story about Bryggen. During the Nazi occupation, a group of young Norwegians formed a resistance cell called the Theta Group. They set up a hidden radio room deep inside the alleyways in a space barely sixteen square metres. From there, they broadcast the positions and movements of German navy ships to the British, helping to track and ultimately sink targets. Ironically, they chose to hide within the old German quarter. They were discovered when a German soldier accidentally stepped through a rotten floorboard and fell into their space. Remarkably, none of the group was captured as they had already escaped. Inside, they'd left a TNT booby trap hidden in a cupboard. It failed to detonate. If it had, it could have destroyed all of Bryggen. The room is now the Theta Museum, open for limited hours in summer. Now follow the map to a building that sits right on this boulevard, where I continue the story of some Hanseatic practices.
