A walk through Danish past: Frilandsmuseet

Our summer holidays during the weekends continue. A month ago we went to Frilandsmuseet that is located at the outskirts of Copenhagen. 

Frilandsmuseet is all about Danish agricultural history and countryside life between 1650 and 1950. It is, what you call, an Open air museum. You are walking through open plains and small forest areas as you are moving from one exhibition to the other. Older buildings are located closer to the entrance and the further you go the closer you get to the modern age. We were lucky that the route we took at the end led us to the buildings from the 20th century, after the Second World War, so we indeed had the feeling of walking through time.

The buildings in Frilandsmuseet are from all over Denmark and that includes: Southern Sweden (it used to be Danish territory), Bornholm and Faeroe Islands. As you are walking around the exhibitions you can see next to the every building where was it located, in what time period and who used it and for what.

Most of the building where residential buildings, but one can also see various types of farm buildings, production buildings and one windmill. We even saw a set of a bit bigger stones assembled in a circle and they were used for the village council meetings.

As I had the opportunity to see something similar before in Croatia, a lot of exhibits didn't surprise me at first but when I gave it a second thought, they did. Even though there is 1700 km between Denmark and Croatia and living conditions differ, the solutions people reached are strikingly similar between the two cultures and that was a surprise in itself. 

As my archeology friend explained. Some inventions were so practical that after they appeared, they spread around like wildfire, stayed for a long time and they were not changing much. That is why you can see a lot of similar living solutions in cultures that are so far away from each other.

 

Closet beds

But there were a couple of things that I haven't seen in other places. First thing that stood out, and it was present in all the houses up until 19 century were beds.

Beds weren't placed in rooms that would then have the function as bedrooms but they were built into something we would call today, a built in closet.

So, we were walking through the house and watching different rooms and then suddenly on the wall you see a small closet doors and behind them wasn't a built in closet but a tiny bed. Tiny, for modern day humans but if we take into consideration how tall humans were couple of hundreds years ago, tiny beds were all they needed. Bed doors could be closed from the inside, so you could have closed yourself into the bed. At first I was surprised but as I started thinking about the living conditions in Denmark it started to make sense. 

Denmark is cold, even today. In the warmest part of the year you need to wear at least a thin shirt with sleeves. There is a couple of days a year that are warm enough so one could walk outside without clothes. And days in the summer are very long, with sunset coming as early as 4:30. With these two things combined, maybe they made closet beds in order to preserve the heat and darkness? Since I moved to Denmark, when the days become long, with the beginning of May, it takes me at least two weeks to stop waking up too early, with the sunset, so I can see the benefit of sleeping in the closet in Denmark, especially during the summer months.

 

Sea weed rooftops

Second unique thing that we saw in Frilandsmuseet were roofs made out of sea weed. Which also surprised me at first but after giving it a bit of thought, it didn't. If you walk around any Danish coast, you will see that a lot of beaches is covered with sea weed. It is just washed ashore smelling bad. With resources being scarce, back in the day and people having to go by with what little was available, sea weed roofs start to make sense. If there is a lot just lying there on the beach and it will keep the house dry, why not. But I recon it was a fire hazard at the same time.

 

 

 

 

Faereo Islands houses

As the whole buildings, I found the Faereo Island houses as unique. They were built on the slopes, half-way dug into the ground. When you would be walking around the house, you would see only one long wall with a grass rooftop, two shorter walls were visible only half way, the other half was just disappearing into the ground. If you would walk behind the house, you would be standing above it and in theory you could walk on the natural grass roof. Very special indeed and most likely an adaptation to the sloppy terrain of the Faeroe Islands (I have never been there, so it is possible that I am wrong).

 

 

Hay beehives

We also had an opportunity to see at least in part how people were making honey between 17th and 19 century. Next to one of the houses beehive was displayed. It was shaped as a cone, made out of wood and hay.

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

If you are interested in seeing and learning how people used to live in this part of the world in the past Frilandsmuseet is indeed a place to see and it will feel like a walk through the past. In addition you will get a healthy workout since the area is big and you will need to walk far. There is also an opportunity to ride in a real horse carriage if one fancies that.

The whole experience made me thinking how wasteful we have become, how far away we have moved from living in sync with the environment around us and how incompetent we have become for a life outside of the modern society.

I am not trying to romanticize now. I am fully aware that it was a harsh, short life with not much creature comfort. And I acknowledge that our quality of life today has radically improved in all aspects. With that being said it still used to be a life where people where living from what was around them and using it to the best of their abilities. People didn't have much and what little they had was valuable. Not like today, when things are so cheap that we change out our clothes, phones and cars like they are perishable goods and with that lifestyle causing the unprecedented trash pollution of the planet.

In the same time we live so far out of sync with nature and environment around us that most of us have become completely incompetent to live "off the land". Ask yourselves the following, if modern civilization collapsed for one reason or another, would you be capable to grow, hunt or pick your food? Would you be capable of preserving your food for the winter? Would you be capable of building and maintaining your house? Would you be capable of making your own clothes and shoes? I think that most of you, including me, would answer these questions with a no.

Well those people were capable of doing all these things and they were capable of withstanding much harsher living conditions, than we can even start imagine. Now ask yourself-  what does that tell about us?

Freezer baby parking

This time I will write about what I consider the most unusual Danish tradition I have seen, parking babies out in the cold.

I moved to Denmark at the end of February. Temperatures were hovering around 0 degrees for the next three weeks with a more or less constant drizzle, so weather was far from ideal. With that kind of weather, one day I am coming home from work and I see 5 or six baby-strawlers parked at the courtyard of the building where I lived in Copenhagen. I was totally out of myself! I even saw a mom coming out with a baby-strawler, parks it outside and casually goes back up to her apartment. So she just left her baby outside in the cold and rain!

When I entered the apartment I described the horror that I just witnessed but Al'Shadar was completely un-phased by it. She just shrugged it of and said: "What of it? We do it constantly and it is healthy for the babies to sleep out in the cold." I must say that at first I took it as something completely mental. Throughout march, Copenhagen was littered with babies sleeping out in the cold.

I became curious about the custom and was asking people what is that all about. I was trying to figure out why are they doing it, for how long in the year are they doing it, how and where did the custom start. From Danes I got the first part and second part of the answer. It is consider that it is healthy for children to sleep out in the cold, they also managed to convinced me that it is quite safe. Babies are tucked in good and they are not freezing, on the contrary, parents often overdress them, they are under constant surveillance with the help of the baby monitor and parents instantly reacts when the baby starts crying. Also, babies sleep out in the cold for as long the temperatures outside are lower then the temperatures indoors and that is the case for at least 6 months in a year, from October to March.

But nobody could tell me how and when did this unusual custom start. Also, the claims that it is healthy for the children was always only on the level of common knowledge and as something that everybody does and knows. When I said that in Croatia I could imagine social services going out if they found out you are doing it, Danes were quite surprised. Since I couldn't get an answer I had to look it up.

The custom started on Iceland in early 20th century during a tuberculosis epidemic. Pedagog David Thorsteinsson in 1926. suggested that putting healthy children out in the baby-strawlers could be a good way of isolating them from the sick children so they don't get infected. From there the custom spread to all Scandinavian countries. Today it is a common practice among parents it is even considered as a bullet-proof evidence of good parenting. 

 

But still is it healthy for real? As it turns out it actually is. In 1990 a study was conducted by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. The study showed that children that spent six to nine hours outside per week were significantly less sick when compared to children that spent between one and five hours outside per week. Finnish scientist Marjo Tourula did a study on infants sleeping outdoors and she realized that children are sleeping significantly longer when sleeping in the cold compared to when they are sleeping on room temperatures.

So to conclude, weirdish custom that could terrify my Croatian relatives if I were to practice it is actually very healthy and beneficial to children. 

 

So please, if you visit Denmark or any other Scandinavian country and see baby parking on the streets at sub-zero temperatures please compose yourself and don't call the social services, you are witnessing a very normal Danish custom.