Bergenhus Fortress, Kode Museums

This afternoon I visited the Bergenhus Fortress (Festning) and sort of three small art galleries under the Kode Museum umbrella.

I would have done more, but as I mentioned in this morning’s post, I got a late start this morning, which meant I had lunch a little later than normal. And then there was lunch.

I ate at a chain restaurant. I don’t know if they’re just a Norwegian chain, but I can’t recall seeing any at home or in any of my travels in other countries. However, I ate at another restaurant in the chain in another city on this Norwegian trip, but I forgot which city.

The menu at the restaurant is decent and I think it was identical at both of its outlets I was at. This chain’s operating practice, or at least at the two I visited, is that every table has a number on it. Patrons have to go up to the bar, tell them your table number, place your order, pay for it, and they deliver the food to your table.

(There’s also a QR code that you’re supposed to be able to use to order from your table. I consider myself to be fairly tech-savvy, but I couldn’t get it to work at either of the restaurant’s outlets. So I ordered at the bar both times.)

I placed a fairly simple order. Fish and chips and a glass of wine. They handed me the wine and I took it back to my table to await my food.

A half-hour later I was still fish-and-chip deprived. I know it was 30 minutes and not just my imagination because the receipt had the time on it and I checked.

I went up to the bar to ask about it. The person there apologized and said that sometimes their computer doesn’t warn them, but they had a sudden rush of orders. She said she should have told me when I ordered that the wait time for food was then 25 minutes.

My math skills aren’t great, but I know 30 is larger than 25. However, I was willing to grant them that five-minute margin of error. I went back to my table.

Ten minutes later, still no food. I managed to flag down a passing employee. She told me she’d check.

A couple of minutes later she came back and deeply apologized. She said there was a glitch in the communication between the bar and the kitchen, but my food would be out in just a couple of minutes. She offered me a second free glass of wine to complement the still half-full glass I had in front of me to make up for it, but one glass of wine was more than enough for me for lunch. So I turned it down.

This time she was right. The fish and chips arrived a couple of minutes later.

All of that is an excruciatingly boring way of explaining why I didn’t do more this afternoon.

The good news is that the all-day rain that was forecast for this afternoon had stopped by the time I finally finished lunch. It was still overcast and gloomy, but at least it was dry.

Stained glass window in the chapel of Rosenkrantz tower at Bergenhus Fortress
Stained glass window in the chapel of Rosenkrantz tower at Bergenhus Fortress

Bergenhus Fortress

The Bergen Walking Tour I went on yesterday took me through Bergenhus Fortress, but not into the buildings. I did that this afternoon. There are two buildings at Bergenhus Fortress that the public can, for a fee, go into, the Rosenkrantz Tower and Håkon´s Hall. I went into the Rosenkrantz Tower first.

Rosenkrantz Tower at Bergenhus Fortress

I provided a picture of the exterior of the Rosenkratz Tower in the post about the Bergen walking tour so I won’t repeat it here.

The tower as it stands today is largely a recreation. It was built in the 13th century and served as home to Norway’s King Magnus. It has been extended since then to improve the fortifications and to allow it to serve additional purposes. In the 16th century, Rosenkratz Tower was the governor’s castle.

Cannonade in Rosenkrantz tower at Bergenhus Fortress
Cannonade in Rosenkrantz tower at Bergenhus Fortress

The footprint of the Rosenkrantz Tower is not at all big. I would have thought a king would have wanted something bigger to live in.

Much of the tower that stands today is a relatively recent recreation.

In 1944, a cargo ship laden with explosives pulled into Bergen’s harbour near the Rosenkrantz Tower of Berenhus Fortress. You can probably guess where this is going.

The explosives did what explosives do. The tower was badly damaged and the upper floors collapsed. The available text didn’t say anything about it being an act of war or other aggression. And it does say it was a cargo ship, not a warship. So I think it was just one of those things.

The recreation was completed in the 1960s.

The interior is quite barren these days. There are a lot of empty rooms, although not all of them are entirely empty. There’s a chapel on one level with a nice stained glass window.

View from the top of Rosenkrantz Tower at Bergenhus Fortress
View from the top of Rosenkrantz Tower at Bergenhus Fortress

The room on the penultimate floor contains a cannon and cannonade. Using an explosive charge, the cannonade was designed so that it was able to fire off anything they had handy. This could have included broken dishes and cutlery.

The top level is where the guards were positioned. There’s a walkway around the outside of that level that affords views of the harbour, the city, and a mountain or two. I had no problem with acrophobia up there. The top of the concrete walls surrounding the walkway was at the height of my mouth. Seriously. There are some narrow gaps in the wall, but they are too narrow for anyone but the smallest of humans to fall through. And there are strategically placed bars in those gaps in case any of the smallest of humans do try to crawl up there.

To get decent pictures I had to lift my phone high and shoot over the wall.

Håkon’s Hall at Bergenhus Fortress

The reception hall in Håkon's Hall at Bergenhus Fortress
The reception hall in Håkon’s Hall at Bergenhus Fortress

I think I need to correct something I said in my post about the Bergen Walking Tour. When the guide took us into the grounds of Bergenhus Fortress, she pointed at a building and said that she thought it looked like a church, but it was actually a Norwegian Royal Palace.

The signage at the Bergenhus Fortress calls that building Håkon’s Hall. None of the signage that I saw inside refers to a palace. All of the text I read inside implies it’s not.

It is, however, connected to royalty. King Håkon Håkonsson was coronated in 1247. But the best available hall for it in Bergen was a boathouse, and that’s where the coronation was held. The king didn’t think this was appropriate for a coronation, so he had a hall built in Bergenhus Fortress so future kings wouldn’t have to suffer such indignity. It’s now called Håkon’s Hall.

Park beside Bergenhus Fortress
Park beside Bergenhus Fortress

In 1261, Magnus and Danish princess Ingeborg celebrated both their wedding and coronation in the hall. Two other royal weddings were also held there in the 13th century.

It’s a beautiful hall, but there’s not much inside to look at. Below the hall are some mezzanine rooms that are set up like meeting rooms. There are a bunch of tables and chairs that look relatively modern, but the signage says the tables and chairs are protected by law and used during events.

Garden Around Bergenhus Fortress

On two sides of Bergenus Fortress, there’s a nice garden with grass, trees, and flowers. Two roads through it are tree-lined and have a tree canopy over them.

Kode Museums

"Four Stages of Life," Edvard Munch, 1902
“Four Stages of Life,” Edvard Munch, 1902

I had partial success in visiting Kode Museums. It’s a collection of four museums and the former homes of three composers. One ticket gets you into all of the museums as long as you go on the same day. At least three of the museums are clustered together in central Bergen. I visited those three. Sort of.

The first one I went to was the Rasmus Meyer Museum. It’s a fairly small museum on two levels that’s dedicated to Scandinavian art, mostly Norwegian. It displays art from a variety of painters. Some rooms display only works from one artist. Others have multiple artists on display.

The Rasmus Meyer Museum claims that it has the world’s third-largest Munch collection. And there wasn’t a single scream amongst the collection unless they kept it hidden away in the vaults.

Modern Scandinavian indigenous art
Modern Scandinavian indigenous art

The next museum I went to was Lysverket, which is a very large building almost beside the Rasmus Meyer. I was less successful there.

I went in the door of the Lysverket and walked past a reception desk. There was no one there to take or sell tickets. But there was a sign pointing to the exhibits up some stairs. I walked up and found only one room with an art installation consisting of some sheets of coloured fabric hanging from the ceiling. That’s all I found there.

I checked the website for the museum on my phone. Oh. They heard I was coming. The building is being refurbished but they still mount some temporary exhibits in there. Or, today, just one temporary exhibit.

I next went to the nearby Stenersen art museum. There is a bookshop on the ground floor and the exhibitions are just on the not especially large floor above that. They mount only temporary exhibitions in the Stenersen.

"Arctic Appetizer," Ningiukulu Teevee, Kinngait, Canada, 2009
“Arctic Appetizer,” Ningiukulu Teevee, Kinngait, Canada, 2009

Currently, there’s an exhibition of modern indigenous art. The first room contains solely Scandinavian indigenous art, both paintings on the wall and 3D installations sitting on the floor and hanging from the ceiling.

I moved on to the next room. There, my eye was drawn to a painting that was not large or prominently placed. So I don’t know why my eye went there. It was a painting of not realistic, but easily recognizable fish heads. I looked at the tag and saw the title before I read anything else. It’s titled “Artic Appetiser.”

I thought, yeah that makes sense here. Fish and seafood make up a large portion of the menus in all of the places I’ve been in Norway. Except for yesterday1, every day I’ve been here I’ve had fish or seafood for at least one meal, and usually two.

Modern indigenous Brazilian art
Modern Indigenous Brazilian art

Then I looked at the rest of the tag. The artist is Canadian. I looked at the other paintings in the room and they were all by Canadian indigenous artists. Then I noticed that “Canada” was stencilled just above the floor, at a single spot on the wall.

As I walked through the other rooms I started looking around for similar stencils on the lower wall. In addition to the Scandinavian and Canadian rooms, there were rooms for Indigenous artists from New Zealand, Peru, Brazil, and Mexico, before cycling back to some art from Norway 

That’s quite enough for a shortened afternoon, I think.

Oh, by the time I got out of the Stenersen, the rain had returned.


  1. Yesterday I had a reindeer sausage street food for lunch and a reindeer filet for dinner. I apologize in advance to all of the Christian kids if Santa doesn’t have enough reindeer to complete his rounds this year. ↩︎

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