Old Town & Hallgrímskirkja

The church is Lutheran, the denomination of Iceland since the Reformation of fifteen fifty. Before that, Iceland was Catholic, converted to Christianity in the year one thousand at the great outdoor parliament called the Althing -- a conversion accomplished not through conquest or missionary zeal in the conventional sense but through a pragmatic decision by the law-speaker Þorgeirr Ljósvetningagoði, who declared after a day and a night of meditation under his cloak that Iceland would adopt the new faith to avoid civil war between its Christian and pagan factions. It was, characteristically, a very Icelandic way to change religions.

Inside, the nave is white and spare, the Lutheran severity of it a relief after the dramatic exterior. The organ, installed in nineteen ninety-two, has five thousand two hundred and seventy-five pipes and fills the space with sound. Take the elevator to the observation deck in the tower if the weather permits. From up there, on a clear day, you can see the whole arc of Reykjavik below you -- the coloured rooftops, the bay of Faxaflói, the mountain Esja rising on the north shore, the snow-capped peaks of the Reykjanes peninsula to the southwest -- and you can understand at a glance why the settlers who came here in the ninth century, exhausted from Norway, decided to stop here and call it home.

The sagas -- the great medieval Icelandic prose narratives that are among the masterpieces of world literature -- give two slightly different accounts of Leif's voyage to Vínland. In one version, he sails deliberately westward based on a report from another Norse sailor named Bjarni Herjólfsson who had sighted land to the west without landing. In another, he stumbles upon the continent by accident while sailing home from Norway to Greenland in a storm. Both versions agree that he found a land with wild grapes, self-sown wheat, and timber -- resources that Greenland, treeless and cold, desperately needed.

The Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, discovered and excavated beginning in nineteen sixty by the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne Stine Ingstad, confirmed what the sagas had described: a small Norse encampment, briefly occupied, on the tip of Newfoundland. Carbon dating places it at around one thousand AD. The Americas had been reached from the other direction, across the Atlantic, nearly five hundred years before Columbus sailed in fourteen ninety-two.

Stand here for a moment and look at Leif looking west. Beyond the bay, beyond the Atlantic, five thousand kilometres away, is the continent he found. Iceland is as close to North America as it is to continental Europe, which is one reason the Norse reached it first and one reason this small island has always carried a weight in the world disproportionate to its size.

The craft shops here are not tourist traps in the conventional sense, though tourists are obviously the primary customer. Many of the businesses are run by the people who make the objects -- designers, weavers, silversmiths -- and the work reflects a genuine engagement with Icelandic materials and traditions. Iceland has an unusually robust culture of making, partly because its isolation and its long dark winters have always demanded it: self-sufficiency in clothing, tools, and food was not romantic pioneering but survival. That tradition persists in the work being done in the studios you will pass.

The coloured corrugated iron that covers so many of the buildings on this street is another quintessentially Icelandic material. Timber is not native to Iceland -- the Norse settlers found some birch woodland when they arrived, and they cut it all within a few generations -- so building materials have always been imported or improvised. Corrugated iron, cheap and durable and easily shipped, became the dominant cladding material in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the tradition of painting it in strong, saturated colours gives Reykjavik's older neighbourhoods their specific and beautiful palette.

Reykjavik was settled in eight hundred and seventy-four, according to the Book of Settlements -- the Landnámabók -- the great medieval Icelandic record of the original settlers. The settler was Ingólfr Arnarson, a Norwegian chieftain who had been involved in a blood feud at home and decided to make the long voyage west into the unknown. The tradition holds that as he approached the Icelandic coast, he threw his high-seat pillars -- the sacred wooden posts from the central place of honour in a Norse hall -- overboard and swore to build his home wherever the gods caused them to wash ashore. They came ashore on this peninsula, at the place he named Reykjavík: smoky bay, named for the steam rising from the geothermal vents in the ground. That steam is still rising. The geothermal energy that Ingólfr read as a divine sign now heats every building in the city and generates a substantial portion of Iceland's electricity.

The name smoky bay suggests something dramatic, but this is not a dramatic landscape in the way Iceland's volcanoes and glaciers are dramatic. It is gentle: a low peninsula, a sheltered bay, good fishing waters, and the constant warmth of the earth beneath. That combination made it a good place to settle. Eight hundred and seventy-four AD makes Reykjavik one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in northern Europe.

The Althing was not a democracy in the modern sense -- it was a gathering of a propertied elite, and it excluded women, slaves, and the landless poor. But the principle it established, that laws should be made by and for the people who live under them, was genuinely radical in the medieval world. The Althing survived for three and a half centuries as the governing institution of independent Iceland.

Iceland came under Norwegian rule in twelve sixty-two and Danish rule in thirteen eighty, and both of those transitions reduced the Althing's power, but it was never entirely abolished. The Danes formally suspended it in seventeen ninety-nine, but it was re-established in eighteen forty-five as an advisory body and grew steadily in power and authority through the nineteenth century. Iceland gained home rule from Denmark in nineteen eighteen and full independence on June the seventeenth, nineteen forty-four, when the republic was proclaimed at Þingvellir, the original site of the Althing, in a ceremony of deliberate historical symbolism. The Althing has sat in this building since eighteen eighty-one, and today it functions as a fully independent bicameral parliament governing a sovereign nation.

The Althing also played a decisive role in one of the great social ruptures of the modern era. In October two thousand and eight, Iceland's three major banks -- Kaupthing, Landsbanki, and Glitnir -- collapsed within a week of each other, bringing down an economy that had been inflated to ten times its sustainable size by reckless expansion into international financial markets. The krona lost half its value. Unemployment tripled. Icelanders, furious and galvanised, gathered outside this building every Saturday through the winter of two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine, banging pots and pans, demanding accountability. The Pots and Pans Revolution, as it became known, forced the resignation of the government. Iceland's subsequent recovery -- through debt restructuring, currency controls, and the prosecution of banking executives -- became a case study in how a small democracy can refuse the terms that larger powers try to impose.

The trees of Austurvöllur are an unlikely treasure. Iceland has almost no native trees -- the Norse settlers cleared the birch woodland that existed when they arrived, and the combination of cold, wind, volcanic soil, and sheep grazing has prevented significant reforestation. The trees planted in Reykjavik's parks and squares are tended with a care that reflects their rarity. Icelanders have a rueful saying: 'If you get lost in an Icelandic forest, stand up.' The joke acknowledges a real ecological wound. Reforestation has become a national project in recent decades, with millions of trees planted annually, but it will take generations to recover what was lost.

The Pots and Pans Revolution that began here in late two thousand and eight was, by the standards of popular uprisings, unusually effective. The protesters did not call for revolution in the radical sense -- they called for accountability, for new elections, for the prosecution of those responsible for the collapse. They got most of what they asked for. Several bankers went to prison. The government fell. A new constitution was crowdsourced from the Icelandic public. The experience left Iceland with a democratic culture that takes its own power seriously in a way that is genuinely instructive. Standing in this small square, you can feel what it means when a public space is genuinely public -- when the people who pass through it know it belongs to them.

Iceland was Catholic until fifteen fifty, when the Danish king Christian the Third imposed the Lutheran Reformation on both Denmark and its dependencies. The last Catholic bishop of Iceland, Jón Arason of Hólar, resisted the Reformation with arms and was beheaded in fifteen fifty along with two of his sons. He is remembered as a martyr and as the last Catholic bishop in Scandinavia to resist the Reformation. Iceland has been Lutheran ever since, the Church of Iceland remaining the state church and the religious tradition within which most of Icelandic cultural life has been embedded for nearly five centuries.

The cathedral's small size is not inadequacy -- it reflects the Reykjavik of the late eighteenth century, which was itself very small. When the Danish colonial administration began to develop Reykjavik as a commercial centre in the seventeen sixties, under the entrepreneur Skúli Magnússon who is often called the father of Reykjavik, the town had perhaps two hundred inhabitants. The church built for that community was proportionate to it. Reykjavik grew slowly through the nineteenth century and rapidly through the twentieth -- from around six thousand people at the turn of the century to its current population of roughly one hundred and forty thousand -- and the city's architecture reflects those different eras of growth.

Inside the cathedral, look at the baptismal register. It is one of the oldest continuous demographic records in Iceland and contains the names of generations of Reykjavik's inhabitants. Iceland's genealogical records are among the most complete in the world -- the Book of Settlements, the sagas, the church registers -- and they have made Iceland a uniquely important site for population genetics research. The Icelandic gene pool, isolated on this island since the ninth century with relatively little outside immigration, has provided scientists with insights into hereditary disease, human migration, and the genetics of population isolation that could not have been obtained elsewhere.

The street also tells you something about Iceland's extraordinary economic trajectory. In the nineteen seventies and early eighties, Iceland was a moderately prosperous fishing nation -- the economy ran on cod and herring and the infrastructure that served them, and while life was comfortable, the cultural and commercial scene was modest by international standards. The financial liberalisation of the nineteen nineties opened Icelandic banks to international borrowing, and the explosive growth that followed transformed Reykjavik in a decade: new restaurants, new shops, international brands, Icelandic musicians and artists reaching global audiences, the Blue Lagoon and the Ring Road becoming international tourist destinations. The growth was genuine in some respects and completely unsustainable in others, and the crash of two thousand and eight stripped away the parts that were built on borrowed money while leaving intact the creative energy and the quality of life that had developed alongside it.

Today Reykjavik's tourism economy is the dominant force on this street and in the city generally. Iceland receives over two million visitors a year -- more than five times its own population -- and most of them pass through Reykjavik. The city has managed this influx better than many comparably sized tourist destinations, partly because the Icelandic character tends toward directness about what it wants to preserve and what it is willing to sell, and partly because the landscape itself -- the thing that draws most visitors -- begins the moment you leave the city and is essentially inexhaustible.

Walk the full length of the street slowly. The cafes are good. The bookshops have English-language editions of the sagas. The record shops carry Icelandic music that you will not find anywhere else in the world, from the ambient post-rock of Sigur Rós to the jazz that has flourished here since the nineteen seventies to the traditional rimur -- the ancient Icelandic chanted verse form that is one of the oldest continuous musical traditions in northern Europe.

That decision looks correct in retrospect. Harpa is an exceptional building and an exceptional concert hall -- the acoustics in the main Eldborg hall are among the finest in Europe, and the building has drawn international audiences for opera, orchestral music, and the Iceland Airwaves music festival that takes over the city every November. It has also become the primary symbol of Reykjavik's harbour, replacing the older industrial quays and fishing infrastructure that occupied this site for most of the twentieth century.

The harbour itself is ancient. Ships have been loading and unloading on this waterfront since Reykjavik's earliest days as a trading post, and the fishing industry that dominated the Icelandic economy for most of its history -- the cod wars with Britain in the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies were fought over the right to fish these waters -- left its mark on this quay. The old harbour to the west of Harpa retains more of that industrial character: the whale-watching boats and puffin tours leave from there, and the old fish processing buildings have been converted into restaurants and galleries with the kind of creative repurposing that post-industrial harbour areas all over the world have undergone in the last thirty years.

Stand on the terrace outside Harpa and look back at the city. The church on the hill, the coloured rooftops, the mountain beyond -- Esja, the flat-topped massif on the north shore of the bay that Reykjavik looks at every day -- and the extraordinary quality of the light. Iceland sits just below the Arctic Circle, and at this latitude the sun's angle is always lower than elsewhere, giving the light a horizontal quality that photographers call golden hour but that here is simply normal hour. The sky does things here -- the colours, the speed of the changes, the aurora on winter nights -- that will stay with you long after you have left.

Ingólfr was not the first person on this island. The Irish monks known as the Papar -- the Fathers -- had been coming to Iceland since the eighth century, drawn by its isolation and using it as a hermitage. They left before the Norse settlers arrived, unwilling to share their solitude with pagans. After them came the Norse: first the explorers and then the settlers, wave after wave through the nine hundred years, families bringing their livestock and their household gods and their social structures from Norway and the British Isles, creating on this remote North Atlantic island a society that was simultaneously isolated from and deeply connected to the wider Norse world.

The old harbour today is one of the most pleasant parts of Reykjavik to walk and linger. The boats are still here -- the whale-watching vessels, the puffin tours, the fishing boats that still work these waters -- and the restaurants that have opened in the old harbour buildings serve the best fish in the city, which means the best fish in Iceland, which is saying something extraordinary. Iceland's fish -- the Arctic char, the cod, the langoustine, the skyr that is not fish at all but a strained yoghurt that Icelanders have been making since the settlement -- represents a food culture built entirely around what the sea and the cold and the volcanic soil provide.

Iceland is, by almost any measure, a remarkable country. Population of three hundred and seventy thousand. No standing army. One hundred percent literacy rate. Electricity from geothermal and hydroelectric sources with no carbon emissions from power generation. A language that has changed so little since the medieval period that a modern Icelander can read the twelfth-century sagas without a dictionary. A democratic tradition that stretches back to nine hundred and thirty and a recent history of holding financial wrongdoers accountable that most larger democracies can only observe with envy. The midnight sun in summer. The aurora borealis in winter. And this harbour, where it all began, eleven hundred and fifty years ago, when a Norwegian man followed his sacred pillars to shore and decided to call this the place.