Sunday 14 July 2019

78° North: around Longyearbyen



I've never been to a music festival anywhere as extreme as Svalbard (warning: this is going to be a post of Norfolk Churches Walk length, but you can always skim over the text and look at the pictures). The mythological Norwegian name has much more of a ring about it than 'Spitsbergen', 'Pointy Mountains', as Dutchman Willem Barentsz called it on discovering the archipelago in 1596, his third voyage in an attempt to find a successful north-west passage. It's marked on this map, made two years later, as 'Het neuwe land' (click to see better).


Of course not all the mountains are jagged, many being sugar-loafed, as we saw flying in to Longyearbyen


or flat-topped as in Iceland (the valleys going up from the west coast).


We got off the plane in a blizzard, and passed the industrial archaeology of the discarded mines, which began here with the arrival of American John Munro Longyear, who started operations in 1906. Norwegians took over after the Svalbard Treaty of 1920, which includes no militarization and makes a special case for any signatory sending people to work here; that's why we had to get off the plane from Oslo in Tromsø and pass through passport control before re-boarding. One of their mines is still working, though that won't be for long as environmental studies and research take over. This is how Longyearbyen looked close to its foundation


and now, at midnight on our day of arrival.


On that first late-night walk we also saw two figures on a patch near the sea


 - free-range reindeer quite at ease in town.


Longyearbyen also depends on its energy supplies from a 1950s power station which keeps breaking down, and then a specialist has to be flown in  from Germany to fix it.


The town looked bleak and modern on a first approach - it was bombed in the Second World War - though all the Norwegian creature comforts are to be found indoors, with so many good venues for eating and listening. The latter I've already dealt with in my chronicle for The Arts Desk, so let nature have the upper hand here (and without the ecological question-marks, which I've raised a little over there).

After the evening of the inaugural concert in Huset, the miners' community centre which has since served a number of functions and now includes a Michelin-starrable restaurant with a huge wine cellar, we had a full day on a boat.


Soon we were head out to the open sea, the bird-rich cliffs near Longyearbyen behind us.


I wish someone had warned me that it was going to be rough crossing the Isfjorden to see the Esmark glacier. I've only been seasick once before, on high seas going to Dieppe, but never actually thrown up constantly. Which I did here, four times, taking pills too late. Of course I had to reel out on to the deck (photo by Aggie Peterson, the wonderful person who made all this possible)


as we approached our wonder, a skua keeping us company.


Ice was breaking off the glacier


and a seal popped up briefly, along with bobbing black guillemots, but no polar bears to be seen. Adrian Brendel, the cellist playing trios plus with Imogen Cooper and Henning Kraggerud, had been at a glacier near the discarded Russian mining site of Pyramiden and saw five bears plus a host of beluga whales. We all wanted to follow in his footsteps, as it were, but the schedules on other days didn't allow it. Anyway, the wonder here was my first sea glacier, and it was worth all the chucking up; I'll never forget it.



Fish was prepared on the boat, but of course I couldn't touch it. Delightful Julia Seljeseth from Arkhangelsk, living in Tromsø with her Norwegian husband and family, soon to move to Brussels, gave me a dry biscuit and two Russian pills, which apparently I wasn't supposed to take at once, but I did, went and lay down in a cabin and went to sleep for 45 minutes before we arrived in the Russian mining town of Barentsburg, originally established by the Dutch in 1924 until a Soviet company took over eight years later.


For this stretch I'm reliant on very good photos from Julia and Danish violinmaker Jens Stenz, another excellent travel companion, since I hadn't charged my camera battery sufficiently; at least I had my glacier pics. Barentsburg is an odd mix of industrial archaeology (the building on the left above is the old social centre, which used to be open 24 hours a day, but NO alcohol; now there's a very low limit), Soviet-era buildings for the mixture of Ukrainian and Russian miners who live here with their families - we saw some miners returning from their shift - and tourist showcase. The church is recent (1990, I think), but finely constructed in the old wooden style.


Living quarters date from the 1970s, clashing markedly with an older (and well restored) town hall


In front of this block a bust of Lenin and a proud proclamation of 'our goal - communism' have weathered the changes, more for museum-piece value, I think.


The school has murals which far outstrip anything in Longyearbyen - local sea fauna


and fantasy images of Moscow and Novgorod.


The 'Red Bear' bar for miners and public alike serves good espresso


and is above what used to be the northernmost brewery in the world until Longyearbyen got one (the latter's cans ready for release below).


The post office is very fancy and tourist-friendly inside, with a splendid array of franks for your postcards, though the two I sent from here haven't turned up, while the one from Longyearbyen arrived four days later. Maybe they really were using this form of transport.


Our duty-and-pleasure here, after a splendid tour by a young Russian woman who had just arrived here after working in much warmer climes, was to hear a two-violin recital from Eldbjørgg Hemsing and Oganes Girunyan, superlative Armenian violinist in the Arctic Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, in the state-of-the-art concert hall/theatre (photo by AP).


Then it was swiftly back on the boat for a relatively calm journey back to Longyearbyen, staying close to the cliffs where we saw a variety of gulls and plenty of puffins (flying or on the water, but only distantly on the rocks; photo by JS).


We had barely an hour to recover from the 11 hour ordeal and wonderland before we were whisked off in a coach for the evening happening: our ACPCO strings having a feast with their adapatations of Danish String Quartet folk arrangements in a lavvo (Sami tent, or to be accurate two tents) some way up the relatively open plain of Adventdalen.


The hero of the evening was violinist Anders Melhus, who revealed to all his talents as a superb improvising stand-up comedian, and all in English too. Heres Aggie's picture of him outside the lavvo.


It was an event of the purest delight; we all laughed so much. The chap seated to the left below is an Iranian Nowegian who was in Svalbard to offer some legal advice. He had to miss the opening concert because he takes classes by skype with a master of the tar (Persian long-necked lute).


I chatted to him in the queue for the only food - reindeer stew, which I HAD to have as I hadn't eaten anything since aforementioned dry biscuit since breakfast. It was superb.


Herds of reindeer were wandering over the plain


and in the interval I saw the author of the startling noise we'd heard in the first half - we think it's a purple sandpiper. It was very much on its own.


Beautiful scene at 11.30pm - sun to the west (never setting at the time of year, of course).


And here's our protector for the evening.


You are advised that if you wish to leave the boundaries of Longyearbyen, you must go with an armed guard. Polar bears are dangerous and a fortnight before my visit, one had crashed into town, occasioning helicopters above and everyone shutting themselves in.

The only two I actually saw were stuffed - this one on the right below in the splendid museum, part of the university building, where APCO musicians were playing a bewitching rarity, Svendsen's Octet (I'd been told the wrong time, so arrived in time for the finale only). Photo by AP.


The other was in the lounge area of the warm, welcoming and yes, peaceful church (open 24 hours a day, every day).




This, Svalbard's second church on the site (the first having been destroyed in the bombing) was consecrated in 1958, robustly constructed by Hans Magnus. It was the northernmost of its kind in the world until the building of St. Nicolas in Nagurskoye, Russia.


I took this on a brisk circuit of Longyearbyen, passing by the harbour where eider ducks with their melancholy cooing were basking, dipping or cleaning by the harbour,


a lone reindeer - probably one of the two I'd seen on the first night - was chewing around the disused mine above the power station


and moss was beginning to colour its way up after the thaw.


Local bus-stop (shelter essential in the winter),


more mine-works with variegated rock,


a mysterious circle of tree-stumps, about which I never did discover more


and the Longyear river.


That evening it was back along Adventdalen and this time up via a series of hairpin bends to a concert in the shed-forecourt of the only working mine, Gruve 7


where Strauss's Metamorphosen and movements from Kraggerud's Equinox were introduced by the very eloquent mine manager. Good acoustics, more about it in the TAD article.


No attempt here to make it all tidy for tourists like Barentsburg, though the mixture of views over pristine landscape and the immediate surroundings was striking indeed.




The next morning dawned with the clear skies we'd been promised for days, and Longyearbyen was alive, as it had been briefly on Saturday too.


Essential stopping-point: Fruene, 'the world's northernmost chocolatier'. Good for lunch, too.


After the final superb chamber concert, Jens and I decided to walk further up the valley to the Gallery Svalbard - though not before he had managed to touch and hold Adrian Brendel's recently-acquired Guarneri cello


and I'd snapped the trio being snapped by Aggie.


Further proof that you don't have to go beyond Longyearbyen boundaries to capture some of the more modest Arctic wildlife like this snow bunting:


and I don't know if this is the female of the species or a baby.


Handsome barnacle geese are everywhere (I saw the pink-footed variety too)


and the wider views upwards, to yet another mine, are spectacular, with the snow seemingly about to crash over the tops.


Downwards towards the main settlement


and then into the gallery itself, as impressive as any of its size. There's a beautiful collection of reproduction maps of Svalbard from the discovery through the centuries (here's a detail from just one finely illustrated one)


within a room that also has reading facilities, as do all the museums.


One of the very friendly guys on the desk, who came to talk about the maps, was happy for me to capture his local tattoo, which shows how much he loves being here.


The treasury, is the Stiftelsen  Kåre Tveter-Sammlung, charting the work of the Norwegian so-called 'painter of light' from his arrival in 1982. It's housed in a space where the high windows frame the real thing


and there's a piano, reminder that with this room and the church there are at least two more venues to add to the five where we attended concerts.


The first 48 paintings were housed here through a charitable foundation in 995; Tveter died 17 years later, though illness had put an end to his creative work in 1998. Figurative elements gave way to increasing abstraction, and an expression both of the light and the dark, with autumn being Tveter's favourite season here. The polarities are well expressed in the hanging



and you need a close up of the above one on the right - it's a poetic expression of what one experiences coming in to land.


So to our last evening, a magical nine-course meal at the Huset restaurant with movements from quartets that were far more than Tafelmusik from four brilliant APCO players. I've written over on TAD how APCO (and Lucerne Festival Orchestra) viola-player Julia Neher made us stop and reflect with her words before Webern's Langsamer Satz, which we then heard in a different way.


The sign of a perfect meal is when you feel neither overfull nor drunk at the end, despite the huge variety of wines, beers and ciders we consumed.


I'm chuffed that I was bossy enough, when we arrived, to insist that the core of us didn't sit at different tables but joined together. So here we are, Norwegians, Poles, a Dane, a German and a Brit, all enjoying each other's company.


At one point there was a cry of wonder from somewhere and outside the windows we saw an Arctic fox ambling by, doing its evening thing on the way in to town. These aren't ideally sharp photos, but at least I caught it in time.



1am - was too charged up to go to sleep before then.


And we still had more time the next morning before the early afternoon flight. So I asked my new friends Ragnhild and Pjer Ketil to join me in walking to the official town boundary along Adventdalen, to the bird gatherings around the husky kennels (they feel safe from predators here). Mostly eider ducks on this occasion, but in impressive numbers, both out on a spit of land


 and below the hill


with couples at rest


 and in flight.


Shouldn't have bothered the huskies by chatting to them in their pens, but otherwise I wouldn't have caught an eye quite like this.


We did in fact see a dog-drawn vehicle being used for practical purposes on our way back.



Even at the airport, the wonders keep on coming - here one had a clear sweep of more than one glacier over the bay (this, of course, is a zoom-in) -


while the waiting area must have the best views anywhere through its vast windows.


Neither out on the tarmac crossing to the plane,


nor on take-off



could I stop snapping. There was a feeling that I didn't want to let go of this extraordinary place until we had flown over the last tip of land. I thought that this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, but the next festival is going to be in February, in the dark days where if you're lucky everything is blue the whole time, and I want to experience that...

20 comments:

David Damant said...

I have claimed before and now do so again, that your approach to Northern places echoes that of C S Lewis. I cannot find a direct quotation but he had a life-long interest in what he termed " Northernness", an interest in the lands of Skandinavia, coupled with a sense of longing for something unreachable. Not sure that "unreachable" applies to you, as you seem to reach right up to the Northern idea, but Northernness certainly speaks to you

David said...

Honoured that you think so. It might be partly a matter of opportunity: the Norwegian Government especially funds its arts so well that press trips pop up quite a bit. Would be unaffordable otherwise (except for mountain walking, which one could do cheaply). I'd say that Southern places, at least Italy, Greece and Turkey, speak as strongly, and the Middle East did during those years when it was easier to visit. But the unreachable is certainly part of the Svalbard experience, in that it makes man feel very small...

Willemijn Heideman said...

I am snowwhite with envy. Next time, can I please, please, please come with you? I could easily have handled double this amount of photos.

David said...

What did we decide elsewhere, Willemijn? I think, ultimately, that if you could shrink to the size of a snow bunting I might be able to carry you in my jacket pocket. But seriously, anyone should think of saving and saving for this, because I've not experienced anything like it, even in Iceland.

Lennart Nilsfors said...

Great reading David! A real adventure in this icy baren part of the earth. Have not been there -but it looks much like Iceland's lonely and wild west and east coast.

David said...

Thanks, Lennart. Of course it doesn't have Iceland's volcanos and lava fields, but it IS that much further north (only a bit of Iceland is within the Arctic Circle). Extreme indeed, but with all Norwegian creature comforts in Longyearbyen.

Susan Scheid said...

What an astonishing trip! Culture at the top of the world. I had to look and see how much further north you'd traveled than my long ago trip into the Arctic Circle to Kiruna, Sweden: I would have had to fly northward for another 8 and 1/2 hours.
I loved the way you ended your TAD review of the musical offerings, so right for all you've described of your journey here, too: "An Arctic fox ambled past; the sun still shone on the snowy mountains at 11pm; all seemed right with the world, though a double consciousness told us that it also wasn't."




David said...

So wanted your commendation on this one, Sue, since it meant a lot to me, rather like the Bergman experience on Fårö. Last week it was sublime business as usual in the one unmissable festival of the year, Pärnu, also leaving us with a feeling of 'right with the world' (even though two far righters are in the Estonian parliament, met Marine Le Pen in Tallinn and made the white supremacist sign on their way in). You and J really must try and come for the 10th anniversary festival next summer. It's impossible to describe the atmosphere of the place, even though you've been to Tallinn.

Meanwhile it gets worse for both of us in our respective countries, though there's still so much to fight for.

Susan said...

I am sorry I took so long to get here! As a travel-related aside, I was in the bookstore today and spotted what looks to be a new Simon Winder book. It made me think again of all the lovely places, Talllinn and Finland included, as well as “virtual” journeys like Winder’s Danubia, for each of which you provided a spur. We shall see what next year brings!

David said...

No need to apologise - took me long enough to write it up. Is that Lotharingia? I bought it, it's on the to-read pile. You read both of the previous gems, I assume, Germania as well as Danubia.

Next year, if not earlier, may see a relocation to somewhere in continental Europe, if it's a case of the UK leaving without a deal. Which looks frighteningly possible, but we mustn't be weighed down by fear - there's still so much to fight for.

David Damant said...

I would guess - even suggest - that there is so much going for London that it will remain a capital of the world whatever happens to the UK as a whole.

David said...

Yes, but I don't want to carry on in this kind of poisoned atmosphere. Need the perspective on it I find when I travel to saner European countries.

Susan said...

Yes, Lotharingia, and you are right, also, that I've read (and thoroughly enjoyed) the two previous books. Winder is a wonderfully evocative writer, and let it be said, with trumpets, that I wouldn't have known of Winder had you not noted him. BTW, I have Capital on order from the library . . . and therefore had better get cracking on the library books I already have, not to mention 4 books I picked up while in NYC, oy! I so wish I were a faster reader! Last not least, I second your comment that we must try not to be weighed down by fear, difficult--and horrifying--though our circumstances are.

David said...

Robert 'The Capital' Menasse is a superlative writer. I'm midway through a little study of his which I wish were compulsory reading for all Brits: Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits (winner of the European Booker Prize 2015). It explains his direct contact with the EU institutions in Brussels, and what he found there, which of course inspired The Capital. The other peerless writer on Brexit, and much else, is The Irish Times's Fintan O'Toole. One one of my always expensive visits to the London Review of Books Bookshop after my opera classes just round the corner in Pushkin House yesterday, I bought his Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.

David Damant said...

When you travel to other countries you meet very nice people, in cultural circles, as described in your columns. And you are perhaps not impacted abroad by the local news? At home we are inundated with the constant news of all sorts of horrors. Maybe also some of the smaller countries just get on with their on the whole happy lives, not too much concerned with, say, the troubles in the Paris suburbs or the yellow shirts in the Champs Elysee, or the corruption in so many countries, and the unemployed young down south. However I take your point and we can only hope that like so many cycles " This too will pass"

David said...

Not so (and this looks like a bit of a non-sequitur). Buffered up to a point, no doubt, but I travel on public transport, I glean the local news even if I can't always read the papers. The difference between a planeful of Estonians or Norwegians (on the way out) and loud, bleating Brits is immediately obvious. Though again it depends where you're travelling to or from.

David Damant said...

One relevant fact is that - well, I have studied five or six surveys of countries - which are the most democratic, which are the best to live in, which are the least corrupt etc etc. In all these surveys the small countries fill almost all the top 20 places. Not surprising I suppose, as there can be more on a community spirit in a small country, which leads to the other good things. But Britain nearly always appears and Germany sometimes - and not the other larger countries. Of course perceptions may now change if the Brexit shambles carries on

David said...

Also the small countries - certainly the Baltics and Iceland - are younger democracies. But surely Germany has been more democratic than the UK for decades - for a start, we're still mired in the class system and privilege rules.

David Damant said...

Have you seen the extreme deference awarded to senior Germans, especially the top businessmen? And in some areas of life there is an elite that has a grip. There is one thing about Germany that helps, and that is the general level of agreement on what might be called cultural values. One aspect of this is a degree of formality accepted in Germany as necessary in business etc, often seen in this country as middle class or posh. I admit that an analysis of this kind is a bit like one of those tedious Sunday paper articles.

David said...

Social conscience and environmental awareness are much, much stronger there. That's what matters to me.