Hi! Yes, I'm alive. I'll type.
"It's a Miracle, Brother Dominic!" (a line from an old Xerox copy machine ad.) My pictures from today have downloaded. Yippie, it makes it so much easier to type the storyline.
It's a little over a half mile from my hotel (Thon Hotell Nidaros) to the Nidaros Cathedral depending on how you walk. Yesterday when I got the official Trondheim tourist map, it showed three buildings close to the cathedral, a Baptist church, a St. Olavs Cathedral and the Kunstsmuseet, the Fine Arts Museum. I wandered around downtown for a while. It's really an interesting city, with many buildings from the 1850s-1890s, churches from the 1700s, new downtown malls, a bit of everything. And of course, interesting construction everywhere. I ended up walking two blocks east of the street I wanted to be on, but that took me past the St. Mary's Church (The Church of Our Lady) from 1739. The eastern side of the church is medieval from the 1100s. The church is in the same diose as Nidaros, but is actually maintained by the city as a meeting place, a shelter, a place to light candles and hold concerts. When I walked up to the doors, a free concert with a well known local soprano was just starting. Rather then
.HEIC)
get up and walk out, I continued on.
This is the Trondheim Tinghus, their "county courthouse." (The national assembly is the Storting, the "Large Ting".) The entryway is lined with six mosaics of important people in the city's history.
I walked back to Prinsens Gate (The Prince's Road) and saw the two churches I was looking for,
The church on the right is the Baptistkirke and the church on the right is the St Olavs Cathedral which is a Russian Orthodox Church. They are both located about two blocks west of Nidaros Cathedral and just north of the Nidelve river.
St. Olav or Olaf was not a nice guy. He was a Viking, who in his travels around the Mediterranean was converted to Christianity. In an effort to unite the country under one king (himself) and to convert people to Christianity, he and his men would enter a community in Norway and ask the local chieftain if he wanted to become a Christian. If he said yes, he and his family (and the others in the community) would be baptized. If he said no, he would be beheaded and the new chieftain replacement was asked if he wanted to become a Christian. They usually said yes.) Olaf also wanted to be king of a united Norway, so he and his side fought the battle of Stiklestad in 1030 against the chieftains who wanted to maintain the local rule. Olav died and was initially buried on the battlefield. A church was built over his grave. Some interesting things happened after this. First, several of his men were brought back to life after the battle. Second, his body was exhumed soon after and moved to the town of Nidaros (now Trondheim) and was buried along the river. After the enemy tried to steal the body, he was again exhumed and his body had not decomposed and his hair and fingernails continued to grow. The body was buried again about 100 yards north and another church was build over his grave so the body could not be stolen. Based on these facts, and the number of people he converted to Christianity, he was declared a saint one year later, in 1031.
While it would seem strange that a Russian Orthodox church would be named after him, in fact, the great Catholic Schism did not occur until 1054, 24 years after Stiklestad. Both Roman Catholic and Russian (and Greek) Orthodox recognize him as a saint. In fact, he was very popular and churches were named after him in Norway, Sweden, England and Rome.
My next goal was the Trondheim Museum of Fine Art, the Kunstmuseum. To get there, I walked down by the river, the banks of which have been made into a long strip park.
The long building on the south horizon is the Administrative Building for NDNU, The Norwegian Technical Institute. The geotechnical program is an old and respected soils programs in the world. I always wanted to spend a semester there, but I was concerned that my "technical" background was not up to their standards. There used to be a lot of illustrious names there.
Turning north, I walked through the courtyard of the Bishop's Palace, just on the south side of the cathedral in the background. They were having a fair going on in the grounds, and the covered areas there were people from the Cathedral Restoration Group. (There were a lot more people there than this shot shows.)
When the first churches were being built, they were made of wood.
This is a replica of the first church in Harstad, Norway. Note the wooden baptismal font.
Later churches were known as Stavkirker, or stake churches. The staves were the vertical poles used to support the upper structure. At the end of the 13th century, there were over 1100 of these churches in Norway.
The Stav's are the vertical posts supporting the building. Stavkirke from Gol, Norway. at the National Folk Museum in Oslo. Many of my relatives were baptized in this church.
There is a small problem with these churches, however. They would burn easily, especially since the waterproofing substance they used was pine tar and ash, hence the dark color of the wood.
In 1248, the bishop at Nidaros laid out the location of the first stone church, some of which still remain. Talking to the mold maker at the fair, she said that the old stone, which was soap stone, was very good quality and much of it still remains in good structural condition, though weathered. Stone that was used in later restoration and construction is of much lesser quality and is crumbling even now and must be replaced.
The Nidaros Cathedral Workshop was established to restore and maintain the cathedral and the Bishop's Palace, to train and administer a craftsman program for the various trades necessary for the restoration work and provide advice to restore and maintain other old stone buildings.
The first person I talked to was working with leaded glass. We talked for about 15 minutes before I realized there were other people standing around me, so I backed off and didn't get any pictures of his work.
The next person I talked to was a mold maker. Her job was to go around the cathedral and take moldings of the stonework. She has to develop a box to hold the mold, fill it with plaster around the stonework and then inject a rubber/plastic molding resin to create a female mold. Once the resin hardens, the box can be removed, and the resin carefully stripped from the stonework.
The blue resin and the plaster supporting it. The plaster would be inside of a box. The mold is of a cornice ornament shown on the left.
The plaster cast of the mold. One piece has broken off. She would glue the piece back on.
The mold maker showing me the piece that had broken.
Her job is to make the best molding she can so the stone carvers have an exact replica of what is being restored.
The next station was the stone carver or sculptor. Here is a white plaster cast of a statue of a bishop holding a model of the cathedral on the right and the gray soapstone being carved on the left.
The contraption of the plaster statue's chest is form of three-dimensional pantograph. It is held in place at three points, one on the top of his head and two on gray disks on either side of the model (see below). This assembly holds a stylus pointer which touches the statue, in this case on the roof of the model. This gives the sculptor an exact location of the roof on the carving.
Which is really neat, except that the sculptor can't get to that point without cutting away the stone without going too deep. And how many of these points do you need to get an exact copy of the plaster cast which is an exact copy of the original on the side of the building. This makes carving the replica take over twice as long to carve as the original carving. A statue like this may take a year to recreate.
The mold maker said that they have a 1000 of these molds completed, with only 5000 more to go. On just the outside of the building. Which can only be done mid-spring to mid-fall. When it isn't raining. On a platform 200 feet off the ground.
OK, nerd that I am, this was thrilling to learn about. 45 minutes and I learned about a whole new area of knowledge, learning from experts in the field. This is why you want to travel!!! (And this is why I told my students to shut up and listen to the guy with the shovel. He has a whole different perspective of soil mechanics than you do.)
And now it's a little after 3:00 and I still want to go to the Kunstmuseum, or the Museum of Fine Art, located across the street from the cathedral. I've only seen the back door, I don't ever remember walking past the front of the building. But that's ok, because you can still get in the back door. Now, this isn't a huge building, From the back entrance, you walk through a short hallway into three rooms. It took me 45 minutes to go through that much.
The first piece, in the hallway, was a video over a sculpture.
The first room was a collection of items that an artist gathered from the museum's collection. It ranged from paintings to fabric art to a telegraph office desk. But the one object that grabbed me was a video of a blind and hearing impaired man seeing a sculpture. There was something really moving about it, seeing the slow, deliberate piecing together of a sculpture using only your hands and toughes on your back. Like the very mechanical leading to the art, the same as the plaster casts leading through the pantograph to the final sculpture. The afternoon was really getting to me, really pulling me into the aspects of creativity.
The next room was a full wall screen video of eight "interviews" of four Palestinian musicians and four Jewish cantors recorded in the 1970's. One of the Palestinians was a lady who had been displaced to a Turkish island who was singing while she was cooking and her husband was playing a six-string banjo like it was an oud. She was talking about the four different cultures she grew up in and how they have influenced her approach to music and how she wished to be back in Israel again. All the segments were fascinating to me, in part because I knew of many of the instruments, having bought an oud and a n'a (a bamboo flute) when I worked in Egypt in 1980.
The third room was another collection of portraits from the museum's collection put together by another artist. There were 60 to 80 portraits ranging from ancient Egyptian and Greek to 2000 acrylic modern, from 2"x2" to 6'x8'. One was a life sized portrait by Edvard Munch ("The Scream" Munch) that the sitter hated and refused to pay for it and tried to have it destroyed. So, now it's 4:00 and I can't look at each painting.
So, leaving that gallery puts me in the entrance/sales shop. So, I ask the guy there what I should do the next hour, finish walking around the first floor, or is there something else? He said, go through the exhibit on the second floor. It consists of 70 works by Else Hagen, a Norwegian artist from the 30s to the 80s. It was too complex and intriguing to begin to describe it, so here are some teasers.
The quote above the portrait describes me pretty well also.
"I think I must both walk among people and be among people.
At the same time, I have a boundless need to be alone."
I've been walking with my walking stick, it is still useful for going up and down steps. When I decided to go to the exhibit o the second floor, they offered to take me up in the elevator. I said I would be fine going up, but having a ride down would be useful. So, at five to five, one of the docents got me and led me through a big door to an Old Elevator. She explained that is really only used to move the art work around and the occasional person. I'm glad I was occasional enough, because the elevator was a piece of artwork itself.
I walked back to the hotel by way of the "Gamle Bru", the old bridge, one of the icons of Trondheim. But as I got to the other side, it started to drizzle and when I walked back it turned to rain. It was ok. Like I said at the beginning of this blog, walking the streets of Trondheim is an exhibit in itself. Old and new, colors and textures. Like my hotel. Good night!
(And now Verizon won't download my last picture. maybe tomorrow.)
.HEIC)
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