Bergen, Norway

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Bergen district and the county of Hordaland, the seat of the Lutheran bishop of Bjørgvin and an educational center, with a university and a commercial college. Surrounded by a ring of hills, known as the Seven Mountains, which are partly forest-covered, with its houses reaching up the lower slopes, Bergen is one of the most attractive towns in Norway. The city of Bergen is an important cultural centre and was honoured with the title European City of Culture in 2000.

Some of the notable cultural attractions include the annual Bergen International Festival, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1765, as well as Nattjazz and Bergenfest (formerly Ole Blues).

The town

The oldest parts of the town lie in a semicircle round the busy harbor, Vågen, and extend up the slopes of the Fløyfjell to the northeast. Like most Scandinavian towns, Bergen has suffered repeatedly from devastating fires, the most serious being those of 1702 and 1916; in the 1916 fire several hundred houses in the timber-built commercial district to the south of Vågen were destroyed. These frequent destructions have left little of the old Bergen, and the pattern of the town center is now set by its wide streets and stone buildings. The Nordnes and Fløyfjell districts, however, have preserved something of the atmosphere of the past, with their wooden houses and the narrow lanes known to the local people as smug. Only in the northern districts of Skuteviken and Sandviken are there still a few of the old seafront warehouses (søgårder) once so characteristic of Bergen - large timber buildings with a crane on the harbor front. Unfortunately many of the old warehouses which still survived were destroyed in great fires in 1955 and 1958.

History

About the year 1070 Olav Kyrre granted a municipal charter to the port settlement of Bjørgvin ("hill pasture") on the east side of Vågen, which was already a place of some consequence. Thereafter the town developed rapidly, becoming an occasional residence of the king. In 1233 Håkon Håkonsson's hereditary right to the throne was recognized at a national Diet held here.

As early as 1236 there were permanent German trading establishments in Bergen. The town's real rise to prosperity, however, began with the establishment of a Hanseatic counting-house, first recorded in 1343. In virtue of a privilege granted by the Danish kings, under which the fishermen of the northern territories were required to bring their catches to Bergen and to no other port, the German merchants soon gained control of all Norwegian trade. Their employees lived in a special quarter of the town on the "German Bridge" (Tyskebryggen), with 16 long narrow houses which served also as warehouses. Each house was headed by a bygherre and was divided into several stuer ("rooms"), each belonging to a particular owner.

In 1559 the power of the Hanseatic merchants was destroyed by the feudal lord, Kristoffer Valkendorf, but the counting-house remained in existence for another 200 years, until in 1764 the last stue was sold to a Norwegian.

During the Second World War Bergen suffered considerable damage; among the buildings destroyed was the old theater in Sverresgate - Norway's first theater, founded in 1851 by the celebrated fiddler Ole Bull, of which Ibsen (1851-57) and Bjørnson (1858-60) were managers.

Shipping and commerce

Throughout its history the prosperity of Bergen has been based on fishing and on commerce, particularly the trade in fish and fish products. In the 17th century Bergen was still of much greater importance as a commercial center than Copenhagen, and at the beginning of the 19th century it had a larger population than the capital, Christiania (now Oslo).

Until the 20th century Bergen remained the leading center of the Norwegian fish trade, and fish and fish products are still important to its economy. In more recent years the establishment of large shipping companies and numerous canning and preserving plants near the fishing grounds has fostered the development of other centers of the fish trade. Nevertheless Bergen's outgoing trade (steel, machinery, etc.) is second only to that of Oslo.