Our holiday in Copenhagen
Friday 27th June
Time for a culture overdose. First stop, the Ny-Carlsberg Glyptotek, an art gallery/museum originally founded by Carl Jakobsen (who, as the founder of a slightly more famous organisation bearing the name Carlsberg, had some money to spend on art)
We started with the antiquities, taking in Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Persian, Roman, Greek, Etruscan and finishing with the Italian Greek Colonies. We missed out on the Palmyrene and Cypriot collections, as they were closed for renovation. The main focus of these collections is on art, particularly sculpture, rather than any wider historical subject matter. It's all fascinating stuff. For example, the Roman collection is focused on portrait sculpture - (mostly life-size) busts of what seems like every classical Roman emperor, neatly arranged in chronological order (with family trees where appropriate) mixed in with similar sculptures of other prominent (or not-so-prominent) people of the period.
After the antiquities, on to some French painters - Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Gaugin, van Gogh, and a bunch of others that uncultured lumps like me haven't heard of, followed by the collection of Danish, French and other European sculpture.
As often happens when I visit art galleries, while I was in awe of the technical skill involved in some works, I found that many did little for me. A lot of them were attractive enough as objects, but I just don't see what's so special. I guess I should refer back to the "uncultured lump" comment, above. That said, there were more than enough items there that I did like to make it worthwhile. Which is the point, I suppose.
By the time we'd finished those parts of the Glyptotek, it was early afternoon, so we skipped the rest. After a quick takeaway lunch from the kiosks in Tivoli gardens, we made our way to the Danish National Museum.
We managed to underestimate the amount of time we'd want to spend in the National Museum even more than the Ny-Carlsberg Glyptotek, so on this visit we only managed to tour their prehistoric collection. Thanks to the large number of bogs in ancient Denmark, the museum has a large collection of very well-preserved stuff, ranging from the skeleton of an aurochs that died of wounds inflicted by late stone age hunters, through the things that bronze-age Danes threw into bogs, and on to hoards of Viking artefacts.
In the later Iron-age period, many these artefacts seemed oddly familiar. About 9 months before this holiday, we visited a couple of Anglo-Saxon sites in Suffolk and, of course, during that period, there were very close ties between the people living in the areas that are now known as England and Denmark.
On our initial tour, Cal was somewhat disappointed to find one of the artefects she has most wanted to see, the Hjortspring boat, missing. Fortunately, it turned out that it had only been moved as far as the other end of the museum, where it was the centrepiece of a special exhibition. During the Bronze and Iron ages, victorious Danes would destroy any weapons and equipment belonging to the defeated enemy, and throw the remains into a convenient bog. The Hjortspring boat suffered such a fate, along with vast quantities of Roman and Danish weaponry, which are all astonishingly well-preserved. I've seen 12-month-old chainmail shirts in worse condition than some of the 2000-year-old examples exhibited here.
The boat itself is a 19-meter, 24-man war canoe, and is the oldest surviving plank-built boat in northern Europe, dating from about 300 BC. If you can call a boat that's been hacked to pieces and thrown in a bog "surviving", that is. Like some other boats mentioned earlier in this diary, this one has a modern replica, which has been timed at about 5 knots over fairly long distances.
Having been kicked out at closing time, we made our way to Tivoli, and I finally managed to talk Cal into the idea of going on the rides. The on-ride cameras duly showed Cal looking terrified, and me grinning like a demented lunatic. Considering that I've seen individual rollercoasters bigger than the entire Tivoli complex, they're got some pretty good rides in there. The fact that the longest queue we encountered in the entire place was only about 10 minutes long (and most were a LOT shorter), you get a pretty good bang-per-buck, too.
We finished off with a stuff-and-chips dinner and the Bob Fosse-inspired show at the pantomime theatre, before retiring to the hotel.
This is probably pretty close to Cal's idea of heaven - part of the Egyptian collection
in the Ny-Carlsberg Glyptotek. Given that we're both the kind of people who will go around
a room like this reading every label, and occasionally discussing particular items together,
it shouldn't have been a surprise that we ran out of time longbefore we ran out of
museum...
The Nydam Oak Ship, a 23-metre iron age vessel excavated from Nydam bog in southern
Jutland in 1863. In many ways, it is a mid-point between the older Hjortspring boat
and newer Viking ships, sharing features of both construction techniques. In the last
15 years, new excavations at the original site have turned up further fragments of the
ship, including wooden posts, decorated to resemble human heads, which hooked over the
gunwales of the ship. Modern replicas of these posts are visible at the righthand side
of the picture.
This ship has had a very interesting history after being dug out of the bog, partly due to the Prusso-Danish war of 1864, which left it in Prussian territory. In 1877, it was moved to Kiel, where storage in an area with poor climate control led to the ship shrinking and changing shape. It remained in Kiel until 1941 when, after a very fortunate escape from an RAF bomb which failed to detonate, it was moved into the countryside for safe keeping. In 1948, following years of post-war nationalistic wrangling involving numerous archeological relics that had traversed the German-Danish border in both directions, the Ship was moved to its present permanent home: Gottorp Castle, in Schleswig. It is currently on loan to the Danish National Museum, where it will remain until March 2004.
Modern Replica? They're working on it.
A detail from our last ride of the evening - our hotel's original 1906-vintage
"Automatisk Elektrisk Personelevator".