Akureyri, up north, is Iceland’s ‘second city,’ although its population of just over 20,000 hardly make it a metropolis. For its first first 900 years, it had no year-round population and as late as 1836, it only had 12 residents.
Despite those inauspicious beginnings, it has stories to tell, and a museum to tell them; it was the highlight of my visit there last winter since it was too cloudy for Northern Lights (Akureyri gets just over a thousand hours of sunshine a year, and nights are cloudy as well) and the town’s landmark church was closed until spring.
The first settler to spend time in the area was Helgi Eyvindarson, a Viking, in the 9th century. The next mention of Akureyri is in 1562 when a woman from the area was sentenced for adultery. A century later, Danish merchants spent summers there, bringing goods and returning home with fish, but there was no actual town, despite the favorable location: Miles from the open sea, at the head of a fjord with good anchorage. Permanent settlement only started in 1778.
Agriculture and fish—and serving as a market town for surrounding areas—helped the town begin to grow by the mid-1800s; the pictures above are from the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th.
In a sense, herring made Akureyri; originally seen as a food only for poor people and more often used as bait or animal fodder, it became a valuable trading commodity with the development of sealed cans. Salted cod also became a major Akureyri product, along with fish oil. The town is now a base for two of Iceland’s major offshore fishing companies, a growing business.
The museum, which also includes an old church and the home of Jon Sveinsson, known as Nonni. A Jesuit priest, he was also the author of children’s books that are still popular. A large part of its exhibit space shows vignettes of life in the town, especially in the last 150 years.
Exhibits about social and home life show changes over time and social class in the town, from 19th century styles and on into more ‘modern’ times.
Comfortable lifestyles and homes of the wealthy are on display, with elaborate furnishings, fine fabrics, and even an elaborate home organ…
…but so is the life of the less-wealthy and even quite poor, whose homes were often built of turf blocks. Akureyri’s last turf house was torn down in 1949. The museum lists the possessions of one such family when the husband, a carpenter, died in 1862. His widow and two children inherited one cow, a horse and the house, along with “28 movable objects such as barrels, pots, a coffee mill, a clock, chests, a chair and a table, and a bed frame.”
The people of Akureyri also made time for some entertainments and celebrations, including occasional traveling shows, such as the acrobat show with its tent that visited in the 1907 photo below.
The arrival of Akureyri’s first automobile was an event attended by, well, people with horses.
And there were home-grown entertainments and traditions, including dressing up in costumes for Ash Wednesday—and an imported Danish ritual for the day of “beating a cat out of a barrel.” (No further explanation!) The children would go from home to home and store to store, singing for a treat. Notice the Cold War references in some of the costumes in these pictures from the 1950s.
While it’s quite a different sort of singing and music, that will be our segue to the museum’s other big exhibit, which highlights a century and more of Akureyri’s local music scene and its role in the town’s life.
In a way, that story begins with Sigurgeir Jonsson, a weaver who went to Reykjavik in 1891 to learn piano. He paid for his tuition by bartering cloth he made. Distressed at playing on out-of-tune pianos, and finding there was no tuner in town, he taught himself that skill as well. In Akureyri, he took on the role of church organist. When a professional musician, Magnus, was hired for that position, they worked together to start a town band and chorus. A local fund drive raised money to send Magnus to Copenhagen to buy instruments and to learn how to play them.
By 1905, the chorus, called Hekla, was able to sail to Norway on a fishing boat and give performances in Bergen, Voss, Stavanger and Hardanger; they were so well received that their hosts presented them with the large banner in the picture above. They were the first Icelandic choir to sing abroad. The blue uniform for the band was made for the town’s centenary celebration in 1962—the town paid for the hat and jacket, but each band member had to provide his or her own pants.
Quite a few other musical groups formed over time, and both traditional and newer instruments showed up in more homes. Singing groups were also popular, and there were strong rivalries among some of them. Geysir, the main men’s choir, had traditionally been drawn from merchants and political conservatives; the rival Akureyri Men’s Choir was started in 1929 with, obviously, the opposite political twist.
A local player, Lydur Sigtryggsson, only 26 at the time, won an upstart victory at the Scandinavian accordion tournament (yes, that’s a thing) in 1946, defeating top-ranked players from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.
And, not to be forgotten, at least in Akureyri, is Bravo, a true ‘boy band’ whose oldest member was 13 in 1965 when they served at an opening act for the Kinks at a concert in Reykjavik. Sadly, it was the highlight of their short career, but a continuing source of civic pride in the “capital of the North.”
Fascinating article. I would love to visit Iceland!