Iddis Museum and Wandering Stavanger

After visiting four of the MUST museums this morning, I visited one more in the afternoon, Iddis. I then did a little more wandering around in Stavanger.

Iddis Museum

Just as Iddis Museum is one of the group of museums collectively known as MOST, Iddis is itself two museums in one. (And when you get inside you find there’s a third.) It’s a veritable matryoshka doll of museums, I tell ya. If I had a powerful electron microscope I’d probably find museums at the microscopic level inside Iddis. Maybe not.

The short entrance lane leading to Iddis is off Øvre Strandgate, the charming street in Gamle Stavanger that I mentioned on my first day here in Stavanger.

The two museums within the Iddis Museum that are named in the marketing material are the Norwegian Printing Museum and the Norwegian Canning Museum.

The sign out front says that “iddis” is the Stavanger term for “label.” But that’s the local dialect. The Norwegian term is “iddikett.” Go figure.

“Label” provides a strong, pretty much unmissable, hint as to how they tie the two museums together.

Norwegian Printing Museum (Iddis)

The Norwegian Printing Museum within Iddis organizes its exhibits largely in chronological order. It starts with a discussion of pictographic languages. This display includes two actual rune stones.

It also gave me a factoid I didn’t know that surprised me. It said that there are at least 85,568 unique characters, each of which is a word, in the Chinese language.

How does anyone learn even a small fraction of those pictograms? I struggle to remember a few hundred English words comprised of the 26 characters of the unaccented Roman alphabet.

The exhibits then move on to look at printing presses and other mass printing devices as they progressed over time. One of the first displays is a wooden printing press with a mechanism similar to the Gutenberg press designed in 1440.

Artistically, but probably unrealistically, pages are displayed as if they had flown off the press. Each page is suspended from the ceiling with smaller wires. The pages are aligned in an arc coming out of the press.

The exhibits then progress in steps to the present time and beyond “print” per se. (The museum is small, so there’s a limited amount of information and the granularity of the chronological progression is course.)

When it reaches the modern time, the displays talk about video media and the internet. It states the obvious, i.e., that the internet provides great benefits in being able to disseminate information widely, quickly, and inexpensively.

But it, the text says, conversely inflicts a penalty in that it also allows the wide, quick and inexpensive dissemination of disinformation and conspiracy theories. A video on a continuous loop accompanies this section. It’s maybe 30 seconds long. The majority of the video is Donald Trump saying that climate change is a hoax to let people make money.

This did not raise a pleasant thought in me. Quite the opposite.

As I write this, it’s now just under four months until the United States holds its 2024 presidential elections. If recent polls are correct and the current public sentiment holds until the election, it seems likely that Americans will, for a second time, elect that moron as their president. “Harrumph” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Grrr.

That’s not close to expressing my feelings about Donald Trump either. But let’s move on.

The Norwegian Printing Museum in Iddis had a temporary exhibit when I was there. It’s titled “Propaganda.” It covers propaganda in Norway between 1933 and 1945. Much of the exhibit focuses on propaganda posters of the National Unity Party (NS) of Norway, which first competed in elections in 1933. It was a fascist and Nazi-supporting party. It won only two percent of the vote in the 1936 election. But when Germany occupied Norway, it became the only legal party in the country.

The exhibit also discusses the use of propaganda in the manipulation of the public.

On the wall that contains the door between Iddis’s Printing and Canning museums, there’s a display of cylindrical cans with labels printed directly on them. The accompanying text talks about the lithographic process used to do the printing. And so we have the segue from one museum to the next.

Norwegian Canning Museum (Iddis)

Despite the cylindrical cans on the segue wall, The Norwegian Canning Museum in Iddis focuses on the cans used to pack small fish, such as sardines.

The museum contains a lot of old equipment that was used to tin the fish and seal the tins, but not to pack them. A sign in the Canning Museum said that the work of packing the fish into tins hasn’t changed over history. If it’s correct, the packing in the early days of canning and still today was and is done by hand. Women who do the packing are called “leggersker.” The quickest of them can pack a can in 4-6 seconds.

I find it hard to believe that the sardines I buy today are still packed by hand. How many millions of tins of sardines and other small canned fish are sold each year? Although, now that I think of it, the museum’s content is about only Norwegian canning. Maybe it’s automated in other countries. It would boggle the mind, or at least my easily boggled mind, to think that every tin of small fish produced around the world is still hand-packed. I doubt that, but I don’t know.

The Norwegian Canning Museum in Iddis also has a bank of fish-smoking ovens. The sign accompanying them says that what makes Norwegian sardines unique is that they are hot-smoked with oak, giving them an oaky flavour.

I read in one of my guidebooks, or maybe TripAdvisor, I forget which, that they smoke fish at the museum on the first Sunday of every month. Today is the first Sunday of July. They weren’t smoking fish when I was there.

The text accompanying the ovens said that the Norwegian style of smoking is a two-step process. It said the first step takes 30 minutes, but it didn’t give the duration of the second step. The second step is at a higher temperature, 100 degrees, so maybe it’s shorter. (This isn’t the United States, so I assume that’s 100 degrees Celcius.)

Maybe they smoke the fish in the morning and I missed it because I came in the afternoon. Or maybe the source I read was out-of-date. Or maybe it never was correct. Whatever the case, I didn’t get to see the ovens in action.

Iddis Bonus Museum: Øvre Strandgate 90

Remember I mentioned that the Iddis Museum is down a short lane off Øvre Strandgate? At the back of the Iddis Norwegian Canning Museum, there’s a door with a sign pointing to Øvre Strandgate 90. (That’s how they do street numbers here, after the street name, not before it.)

As you probably guessed, Øvre Strandgate 90 is a house on Øvre Strandgate Street and it’s typical of houses on that street in Stavanger’s old town. The house is now under the auspices of Iddis. The street entrance is closed. The entrance into it from the rest of the Iddis Museum is through the back door.

The brochure available at Øvre Strandgate 90 says that the house has multiple names. It started its life known as the “Thilo House.” Thilo was the name of the family that built it. Later, for many years, it was rented out to widows and unmarried women and became known as the “Widow House” and the “Bower House.”

Today, it’s been outfitted with furnishings from the 1920s, and is meant to represent the years of two distinct decades, the 1920s and the 1960s, when many of the inhabitants in the houses of Gamle Stavanger (Old Stavanger) were people who worked in the canning factories. As a result, the house is now also known as the “Workers’ House.”

Even though the museum aspect of the house is supposed to represent those two separate decades, the brochure notes that all of the furniture is from the 1920s because, surprisingly, when they set up the house they found it easier to get furniture from the 1920s than the 1960s.

More Wandering in Stavanger

After I finished with Iddis, I had seen all of the recommended sights in Skavanger listed in my two guidebooks and TripAdvisor that interested me in the slightest, and that was the vast majority of the sights listed in those sources. So I did some more wandering around.

I walked again in the districts on either side of the harbour that I so much enjoyed on my first day and a half here. But I also went a little farther afield this time. I walked through a neighbourhood that’s south of the district on the east side of the harbour that I’d been to before.

This new neighbourhood (new to me) was not as charming as the Stavanger districts that I’d wandered through before, but, for the most part, it’s not ugly and there are some very handsome, if not exciting, buildings.

I said, “for the most part” not ugly. I did walk by I forget how many adjacent homes—I believe it was in the order of three or four—that were abandoned and graffiti-covered. But I think that’s probably a temporary state. Immediately behind that row of houses was a large plot of land, probably at one time several housing plots, that had been bulldozed and was surrounded by construction fences. I’m guessing that the abandoned houses will join that abutting plot of land to be bulldozed and developed into I don’t know what. But that’s only a guess.

I leave Stavanger by bus tomorrow for my next Norwegian destination. The bus doesn’t leave until close to noon, so I’ll probably go out for a bit of a walk in the morning to stretch my old legs. But because I’ve run out of places of note to write about here, I’ll likely just walk around the places I’ve already enjoyed and written about. So I doubt I’ll post an entry here tomorrow morning.

If the bus is on time, I’ll get to my next destination around 4:30 in the afternoon. I’ll probably write a post from there, but because I won’t have a lot of time to do stuff, the post will likely be short.

Because this is almost certainly my last post from Stavanger, it’s time for a summary of my time in the city. (If anything exciting unexpectedly happens here in the morning tomorrow I’ll write a bonus post and put a link back to this one for the summary, but I’m not expecting that.)

Stavanger Summary

First off, let me say, that, for some unknown reason, my brain keeps wanting to type the city’s name as “Stavenger,’ not “Stavanger.” My spellchecker has learned Stavanger, but not Stavenger, so I don’t think any of the typos slipped through in my posts, but if so, please accept my apologies for that.

I very much enjoyed Stavanger. It’s a beautiful city, particularly at the harbour and the neighbourhoods around it. Plus, there was that Lysefjord cruise from Stavanger, which was amazing.

Because I ran out of sights to see, I probably could have done with a half-day less here. However, I relished absorbing the atmosphere of the harbour and surrounding areas so much that I didn’t regret that extra time.

If you’re a younger person than I am with less of a fear of heights than I have, there are at least a couple of hikes that you can take to high places. Those two hikes, to Pulpit Rock, which I mentioned in the Lysefjord cruise post, and Kiragbolten, which I haven’t mentioned in these pages, both start a bit of a drive from Stavanger. But there are options for getting to the starting points that don’t necessarily involve renting a car, such as booking a guided hike that includes transportation to the starting point.

Again, from what I’ve read, the culmination of each is a very vertiginous point, which is a problem for me. But if you’re not acrophobic, and you’re up for what I’ve read are only moderately strenuous hikes, then you might want to spend a day or two more in Stavanger than I did. And there are other boat trips you could take.

In conclusion, I’m very pleased I came to Stavanger.