Reykjavik: Fire, Ice & the Midnight Sun

Construction began in nineteen forty-five and took forty-one years. The main tower was not finished until nineteen eighty-six. Think about that — four decades of a country with barely three hundred thousand people committing, season after season, to finishing a single building. The tower you're looking at is the result of that stubbornness.

The church is named after Hallgrímur Pétursson, a seventeenth-century Icelandic Lutheran pastor and poet, whose fifty Passion Hymns — meditations on the suffering of Christ — have been a constant feature of Icelandic religious life for over three hundred years. He died of leprosy in sixteen seventy-four.

The tower observation deck is open to visitors for a small fee. From the top, you can see the entire city of Reykjavik, the deep blue waters of Faxaflói bay, and on clear days the snow-capped peak of Snæfellsjökull glacier about a hundred and twenty kilometres to the northwest. It is the best single view in the city.

Before we begin the walk, notice the Arctic air on your skin. This is what sixty-four degrees north feels like. In summer you are in a city that barely gets dark — the sun circles the horizon at midnight in a long golden haze rather than setting. In winter the reverse is true, the sun scraping low across the south for only five hours before disappearing. Icelanders have been adjusting their lives to this rhythm for over a thousand years.

Step back and look at the statue in front of the church. That is our second stop, and it is a very important figure.

The statue itself has a specific political history. It was made by the American sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder — father of the mobile-maker Alexander Calder — and was donated to Iceland by the United States Congress in nineteen thirty. The occasion was the one-thousand-year anniversary of the Alþingi, Iceland's parliament, which was founded in nine hundred and thirty AD. The United States was, in a sense, acknowledging that the first European to stand on American soil was an Icelander, five centuries before Columbus.

The plaque on the base reads: "Leifr Eiricsson, son of Iceland, discoverer of Vinland." Iceland is a country of three hundred and forty thousand people. It has produced the first European to reach the Americas, the first female elected head of state in the world, and more Nobel laureates per capita than almost any other country. It is a country that has consistently punched several weight classes above what its size would suggest.

Walk to the statue's right side and look down the hill. You're about to descend into the heart of the city on Skólavörðustígur — the most beautiful street in Reykjavik. Take your time on the way down.

The corrugated metal cladding arrived in Iceland in the mid-nineteenth century — imported, initially, because Iceland had almost no forest and therefore almost no local timber for construction. The metal was practical: waterproof, windproof, resistant to the salt air coming off the North Atlantic. Over generations it became beloved rather than merely pragmatic, and now the distinctive painted-tin look defines Reykjavik's visual identity more than any other single element.

Look at the painted rainbow running down the centre of the street. It was first painted in twenty fifteen for the Reykjavik Pride parade and was supposed to be temporary. The city intended to remove it after the festival. Locals and visitors liked it so much that the city has repainted it every spring since, and it's now a permanent feature. Iceland was the first country in the world to elect an openly gay head of state — Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, who came to power in two thousand and nine — and the rainbow on this street is one of many reminders that the country's progressive politics are not recent imports but deeply embedded in the culture.

As you walk down, look into the shop windows. The Handknitting Association of Iceland is partway down on your left — the place to buy a genuine lopapeysa, the traditional Icelandic wool sweater with the yoke pattern. Each is hand-knitted from the waterproof fleece of Icelandic sheep, a breed that has grazed these hills since the original Norse settlement. A good one will cost thirty thousand króna and will last twenty years.

At the bottom of this street you will meet Laugavegur, the main shopping boulevard, but first we are turning left — west — toward Tjörnin, the small lake at the heart of the city.

This is a good moment to talk about geothermal energy, because it explains almost everything that is unusual about life in Iceland. Iceland sits directly on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the seam where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are pulling apart at roughly two centimetres per year. Beneath the island the earth's mantle is unusually close to the surface, and volcanic heat is abundant. About eighty-five per cent of Iceland's homes are heated by hot water pumped directly from underground geothermal sources — no oil, no coal, no gas. The water arrives at your radiator having come straight out of the earth. The same system heats every outdoor swimming pool in the country, which is why Reykjavik has public pools that stay open at thirty-eight degrees in a January blizzard.

Look across the lake to the modernist building on the northern shore — that is Ráðhúsið, the City Hall, completed in nineteen ninety-two. Inside, on the ground floor, there is a large three-dimensional relief map of the entire country. If you plan to travel outside Reykjavik, go in and look at it. Iceland is much larger than it appears on most maps, and the distances between the volcanoes, glaciers, geysers and waterfalls are much greater than visitors typically expect.

The park around Tjörnin is used by locals the way a village green is used in an English village — picnics in summer, skating in winter, and a general sense that this is where the city breathes.

But the more relevant reason to stand here and think about Icelandic culture is the artist who is not in the National Gallery, because she outgrew it. Björk Guðmundsdóttir was born in Reykjavik in nineteen sixty-five. She began singing professionally as a child, became the vocalist of the post-punk band Sykurmolar and then The Sugarcubes before launching a solo career in nineteen ninety-three that has consistently been one of the most original and influential in contemporary music. Björk is Icelandic in the way that her work only makes sense in the context of this landscape — the oblique angles, the unyielding winter light, the way Iceland combines extreme natural violence with fragile human warmth. She has said that the Icelandic language, with its preserved Norse vocabulary and its poetic directness, shapes how she thinks about sound.

Iceland has around three hundred and forty thousand people. Its creative output per capita — in literature, music, film, and design — is extraordinary. The country has an unusually high rate of book publication per capita, a very active music scene concentrated in the Reykjavik clubs along Laugavegur, and a tradition of storytelling that goes back to the Sagas, the prose narratives written down in the thirteenth century describing events from the ninth and tenth centuries. The Saga tradition — long, detailed, politically astute narratives about real people and real conflicts — is as close to a national literary identity as any culture possesses.

Now look at the square itself. This small open space has been the site of the most dramatic democratic events in modern Icelandic history. In October two thousand and eight, Iceland's three largest banks collapsed within a single week. The country's entire banking system had grown to roughly ten times the size of the national economy during a decade of reckless expansion. When it collapsed, the currency lost half its value, unemployment tripled, and families across the country lost savings overnight. The government seemed paralysed.

What happened next is called the Búsáhaldabyltingin — the Pots and Pans Revolution. Beginning in January two thousand and nine, thousands of ordinary Reykjavikers gathered here on Austurvöllur every evening with pots, pans, and kitchen utensils, and banged them as loudly and for as long as they could. Night after night. The noise was deafening. On the twenty-sixth of January two thousand and nine, the government resigned. Iceland was the only country in the world to prosecute and jail its senior bankers after the financial crisis — nine bank executives eventually went to prison.

Four thousand people with kitchen equipment, in a plaza the size of a small park, brought down a government. This is where it happened.

This is the crucial point. The Alþingi was not a king's advisory body. It was not a parliament in service of a monarch. Iceland in the age of the sagas was a commonwealth without a king, governed by law and assembly. It was an early experiment in republican self-government that lasted for over three centuries before Icelandic chieftains submitted to the Norwegian king in twelve sixty-two, partly due to prolonged civil war. The memory of that original commonwealth has been an animating force in Icelandic political culture ever since.

The Danes dissolved the Alþingi in eighteen oh one. It was revived in Copenhagen in eighteen forty-five as a consultative body, moved to Reykjavik in eighteen forty-four, given this building in eighteen eighty-one, and re-established as the parliament of an independent Iceland on the seventeenth of June nineteen forty-four. Today it has sixty-three members elected by proportional representation from six constituencies.

It is the world's oldest surviving parliament by continuous historical record. On a warm summer day in Reykjavik, you can walk up to the front of this building, peer through the windows, and watch democracy happening in a room the size of a large school hall.

Look down the street as you walk east. The painted concrete and corrugated-metal buildings continue here — some freshly repainted, some a little weather-beaten. Reykjavik does not have the kind of grand nineteenth-century boulevards you find in Copenhagen or Helsinki. It was not a grand imperial project. It grew from a farm, then a village, then a town, and the architecture reflects that organic, improvised history.

If you are hungry, this is the street to eat on. Icelandic cuisine has changed dramatically in the last thirty years — the country now has a serious restaurant scene drawing on Arctic ingredients: Arctic char, Icelandic lamb, skyr, crowberries, angelica, and a dizzying array of North Atlantic fish. The traditional dish you should try at least once is kjötsúpa — lamb soup with root vegetables and barley, slow-cooked and warming in a way that makes complete sense in a country where winter is long and cold arrives fast.

Hafnarhús is permanently associated with the artist Erró — Guðmundur Guðmundsson — a Reykjavik-born painter who has donated a large part of his life's work to the museum. Erró, born in nineteen thirty-two, is one of Iceland's most internationally recognised artists: a pop-art influenced painter whose dense, layered canvases combine comic-book imagery, political iconography, and historical references in compositions of extraordinary visual density. His work is funny, disturbing, and politically direct. He has been painting continuously for over six decades.

Admission to Hafnarhús is modest, and the current exhibitions are listed at the entrance. Contemporary Icelandic art is often surprising — the country's creative culture draws on both its deep Norse and saga tradition and its engagement with international contemporary practice, producing work that often feels genuinely unlike anything made elsewhere.

From here, walk north toward the harbour. You can smell the sea now. The harbour is only two hundred metres ahead, and our last stop — one of the most architecturally significant buildings in northern Europe — is right on the waterfront.

Now, the story of how this building almost did not exist.

Construction began in two thousand and seven, jointly funded by the Icelandic government and the country's largest bank, Landsbanki. In October two thousand and eight, Iceland's banking system collapsed in one of the most spectacular financial failures of the twentieth century. Three major banks failed within a single week. Landsbanki went bankrupt. The national currency lost half its value against the euro in days. The Icelandic government itself teetered on insolvency. Harpa was roughly fifty per cent built. The steel frame was up. The glass cladding was underway. The interior was largely unfinished.

The debate about whether to continue was savage. Many Icelanders wanted to demolish the half-finished building — it had become, in their eyes, a monument to the vanity and recklessness of the banking class that had destroyed the economy. But the government chose to finish it. In the middle of austerity, Iceland would complete its concert hall.

Harpa opened on the fourth of May, twenty eleven, with a performance by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. It is now considered one of the finest concert venues in northern Europe. The main hall, Eldborg, seats eighteen hundred people. The intimate chamber hall, Norðurljós — Northern Lights — seats two hundred and fifty and has been cited as one of the best small concert spaces in the world. The building hosts the Iceland Airwaves music festival every November, one of the most respected boutique music festivals in Europe.

Go inside. The atrium is free to enter. Look up through the glass at the sky above the harbour. On a clear evening, the gold and grey of the panels catch the last light of the Arctic sun in a way that is genuinely difficult to describe to someone who has not seen it. If the Northern Lights are forecast tonight — and in Reykjavik from September through March they frequently are — come back to this waterfront after dark. Stand here by the water, with the glass of Harpa behind you and the black harbour ahead, and look north.

That is the end of the walk. You have crossed the world's northernmost capital from its highest spire to its harbour — through eleven hundred years of democracy, over the rainbow street, past the pond that steams with geothermal heat, through the square where a government was brought down with kitchen utensils, along the road named for the hot springs where laundry was once done, to a glass building that survived a national bankruptcy and stands on the waterfront as evidence that small countries can make something beautiful out of catastrophe.

Þakka þér kærlega fyrir. Thank you very much. Welcome to Reykjavik.