Iceland (8): A Day in Reykjavik

An Open-Air Museum, a Remarkable Church and the Sun Voyager

Árbæjarsafn, Árbær Open-Air Museum

Iceland

Reykjavik

On our final day in Reykjavik, we decided to spend the morning at an open-air museum.

In 1900 Reykjavik had a population of 78,000, by 1950 it had almost doubled and there was some concern that ‘old Reykjavik' was disappearing. In 1957, the city council agreed to create an open-air museum with old houses of historical interest. Árbær Farm and Inn, once a rest stop for people travelling to and from Reykjavík was by then abandoned and on the edge of the urban sprawl. It was the perfect place for a building museum.

I like building museums, we have visited several excellent examples in Denmark, Poland and the UK, but these are places that, unlike Iceland, have attractive vernacular buildings. Iceland is volcanic so the rocks are relatively recent and there is little building stone, no raw materials for brickmaking, and very few trees for timber. As a result, most Icelandic buildings look like they were bolted together from a flatpack and then painted in a spectrum of colours stretching from magnolia to grimy grey. The standard of interior decoration is high and they are very comfortable, but the outsides are almost uniformly drab. I was interested to see what a building museum could offer.

Árbæjarsafn was a twenty-minute drive from our city centre hotel. The buildings are well laid out and below are pictures of several of them and their contents – not too many, I am trying to keep this readable, and anyway it is not a guide book.

The ÍR House

In 1859 French Catholic missionaries arrived in Reykjavik, purchased some land and built a chapel. It was the first Catholic Church is Iceland since the Reformation. In 1897 the chapel was replaced by this prefabricated building imported from Norway.

The ÍR House, Árbæjarsafn

In 1929, the construction of the Cathedral of Christ the King made this building redundant and it was given to Reykjavik Sports Club (ÍR). It was relocated and became a sports hall. It now houses an exhibition of toys, and a reminder of its original purpose.

Inside the ÍR House, Árbæjarsafn

Laufásvegur 31

A timber house with corrugated iron cladding, Laufásvegur 31, was built in 1902 and was one of a number of prefabricated Swiss-chalet style buildings brought over from Norway at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century. It was owned by a merchant, Hannes Thorarensen, who lived there with his family until 1967. The Laufásvegur site was then bought by the British government for the construction of a new embassy and the house donated to the museum.

Laufásvegur 31, Árbæjarsafn

Árbær

The Árbær farmhouses are the only museum buildings still in their original locations. Built between 1891 and 1920, turf and stone were used in the oldest construction, but they are mostly timber.

Árbær Farm, the only building in its original location, Árbæjarsafn

Longer than they look from the outside, the living space was larger than we expected…

Árbær Farmhouse interior, Árbæjarsafn

…but seemed somewhat spartan.

Árbær Farmhouse interior, Árbæjarsafn

I am unsure the date of the current furnishing, but the farmhouse was occupied until 1948.

The Sheepshed

The turf house by the farm is undatable, and so is the sheepshed. Many of Iceland’s oldest buildings look like this and some are still in use for storing farm machinery or sheltering animals. In the past I presume they also provided human habitation, but I have encountered little information.

The sheepshed,.Árbæjarsafn. I think the roof needs mowing

Hábær

Hábær was built in Reykjavik in 1867 by a labourer called Jón Vigfússon. It was rebuilt in 1887. This style of house with stacked main walls and a timber roof was peculiar to Reykjavik and most examples were built in the final decades on the 19th century.

Hárbær, Árbæjarsafn

There is much more, but I think that is enough, they do look a bit samey. I will finish with a photo looking over some of the museum houses to modern housing on the hill behind.

Árbæjarsafn and the land beyond on a typically cool, drizzly August morning

The new apartments are, doubtless, more efficient and comfortable, but like the museum houses, functionality is all. Building in Iceland was and is about dealing with the conditions and the scarcity of resources, if you can manage that why bother about anything else.

Lunch

We drove back into central Reykjavik, parked the car near our hotel where it could stay until our crack of dawn departure tomorrow and walked up and down Austurstræti, our nearest road of restaurants. Our search for a cheapish lunch presented some difficulties, cheapish not being a word that has much traction in Iceland. Eventually we settled for a coffee and sharing bowl of haloumi fries, not health-food, but it would do.

Hallgrímskirkja

Skólavörðustigur

Full of carbohydrate, we walked to the end of ‘restaurant street’, crossed the main road into Bankastræti and 200m later turned into Skólavörðustigur.

Skólavörðustigur is dead straight and climbs gently for 500m to Hallgrímskírkja, the biggest church in Iceland. The pedestrianised end of the street was painted, permanently, with a rainbow flag in 2019 for Reykjavik Gay Pride Festival. I am also informed that for those who believe shopping is a recreational activity, this is the place to be.

Skólavörðustigur

The Church of Iceland

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland has a special place in the constitution. It is in full communion with the Lutheran Churches of other Nordic and Baltic Countries, and with the Church of England. The Bishop of Iceland, Agnes Sigurðardóttir, has a modest cathedral in central Reykjavik, the much larger Hallgrímskírkja is only a parish church. There is a story that the original design involved a smaller tower, but the height was increased to 75m to make it higher than the tower of the Catholic Cathedral.

Leif Ericsson

The statue in front is of Leif Erikson, the first European known to have visited the North American continent. He lived from around 970 to 1020 so it could be a good likeness, but nobody knows. Predating the church, it is the work of American sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder and was a gift from the United States to honour the 1930 Alþing Millennium.

Church Exterior

Work started on Hallgrimskirkja after World War II. It was completed in 1986 and named after the 17th century religious poet Hallgrímur Pétursson. The design, by State Architect Guðjón Samúelsson divides Reykjavik opinion. It supposedly represents Iceland’s rocks, mountains and glaciers, and although I can see the basalt columns, I can also see the likeness to a space shuttle.

Leif Erikson and Hallgrímskirkja

From a different angle, it looks like a barn behind an enormous phallus.

Hallgrímskirkja, a barn with a phallus

Having claimed earlier that Icelandic architecture makes little effort to be anything other than grimly functional, I have to give Hallgrimskirkja 10 out 10 for trying, even if I not sure I like it.

Church Interior

The interior is very plain, shockingly plain, Lynne thought, though I quite like a bit of minimalism.

Hallgrímskirkja interior

There is no argument about the organ, though; 15m high with over 5,000 pipes it is an impressive beast.

Organ, Hallgrímskirkja

Sólfar – The Sun Voyager

The older part of Reykjavik sits on a peninsula, and we made our way down to the northern shore where a footpath runs alongside the bay. Zig-zagging through residential streets was required to hit the 4-lane Highway 41 – which also follows the shore – at a crossing. On our way we passed some painted houses. I doubt these would be remarkable elsewhere, but here the unusually cheerful colours make a noticeable and very pleasant change.

Colourful houses, Reykjavik

Highway 41 was not as fierce as the map made it look – well this is Iceland, there’s not so many cars because there’s not so many people – and we followed the footpath westwards towards the tip of the peninsula.

Coastal path, Reykjavik

We soon we reached Sólfar, the Sun Voyager, a sleek contemporary portrayal of a Viking-age ship made of shiny silver steel (Rough Guide). The work of Jón Gunnar Árnason (1931-89), the design won a competition for an outdoor sculpture to celebrate Reykjavik’s 200th anniversary.

Sólfar, The Sun Voyager, Reykjavik

For the artist, Sólfar was not a Viking-age ship but a dream boat and an ode to the sun [representing] the promise of undiscovered territory and a dream of hope, progress and freedom. (Icelandtravel). Jón Gunnar (I am not claiming I knew him, that is the correct formal way to refer to an Icelander) was seriously ill with leukaemia and did not live to see the sculpture installed in 1990. Some have argued that Sun Voyager should be seen as a vessel that transports souls to the realm of the afterlife. (icelandtravel, again). The artist lived long enough to hear this and deny it, but it does have a ‘sailing into the sunset’ feel.

There is no ‘correct’ interpretation, each viewer can make their own. I think this is an extraordinarily beautiful object and am happy to believe several contradictory interpretations simultaneously.

Dinner - and Icelandic Food in General

For our last meal in Iceland we returned to the place where we had started, the café offering the ‘World’s Worst Pizza.’ It is actually a glorified fish and chip shop, though the man of eastern Mediterranean appearance who seems to be in charge actually offers, by local standards, a wide-ranging menu. Lynne chose falafel and a Greek salad while I went for fish and chips, something I rarely order except at the annual Fish and Chip Walk. The chips were good but the cod was like no cod I have ever eaten before; light, fluffy sumptuous. I have a brief list of culinary Pythagorean ideals, the dishes or drinks of which every other version is a pale copy. I had never thought a piece of battered cod could enter such a list, but I was wrong. (Dinner at Hambleton Hall contains a complete list of these ideals.)

Sign outside a Reykjavik Restaurant

Nobody goes to Iceland for the food. Menus are brief and vary little, the cooking while always competent, lacks flair and the prices are eye-watering. But they do have some of the freshest fish available. We always enjoy the fresh fish in Portugal, but this is fresh white fish from cold northern waters and that has never come our way before. The arctic char at the Magma Hotel, Kirkjubæjarklaustur, the plaice at Borganes and now this battered cod will be treasured memories.

Epilogue

And so, our 8 days in Iceland come to an end. It has been a memorable journey; the country has a stark beauty where the traveller is forever being reminded of the immense power of nature. I have long been a fan of desert landscapes, in some ways Iceland is a desert in green and white rather than the usual yellow and brown.

The built environment is less pleasing, but resources are thin on the ground and just to live and thrive in this place is some sort of triumph, and they do thrive, Iceland is affluent and remarkably well organised. And there is not very much built environment, the island of Great Britain is twice the size of Iceland yet has 160 times the population, so the ugliness comes in small and almost ignorable portions.

The climate is generally dismal. We had a wonderful day of warm, gentle sunshine when we visited Þingvellir and I liked the long light evenings, but far too often Iceland’s August was reminiscent of late October in North Staffordshire, itself not noted for the balmiest of climates.

Will we return? Well, there is more to see so I cannot rule it out, but there are other places with more pressing invitations and warmer sunshine which need to be visited first, but I am very glad we went there once.

Iceland

Part 1 Introduction to Reykjavik
Part 2 West from Reykjavik along Route 1
Part 3 A Calving Glacier, a Basalt Pavement and an Otherworldly Canyon
Part 4 Vik, Skógafoss and Skógar
Part 5 The Golden Circle, Gullfoss, Geysir and Þingvellir
Part 6 The Snæfellsnes Peninsula: Whale Watching and Fermented Shark
Part 7: Covid Testing, Grindavik and the Blue Lagoon
Part 8: A Day in Reykjavik