Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.07.2011, Blaðsíða 18

18
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 10 — 2011
Reykjavík | City planning
Egill Helgason is journalist, political commentator, blogger and the
host of Iceland's only literary TV show, as well as Iceland's premiere
political talk show.
Lækjargata is one of the
main streets of downtown
Reykjavík, lying alongside
Reykjavík’s pond, Tjörnin,
through the centre of town
and towards the new concert house
Harpan. Not everyone is aware of
the fact that a small river—or brook—
runs under Lækjargata, and it is
from that river that the street takes
its name (“River road”). The river
was closed in 1911, partly because it
smelled badly. But it still flows under
the street. Now, ideas have been put
forward to open it up again.
THE STINKING PATH
In the beginning of the 20th century,
Reykjavík still had open sewers where
excrement and other unpleasantries
f lowed freely. Much of this ended in
the river, and the smell was sometimes
awful. Because of this, Lækjargata was
sometimes referred to as "the stink-
ing path." At this time, water was still
pumped out of wells in the town and
sometimes there were instances of ty-
phus. Water carriers, mostly old people
in rags, such as the fabled character ‘Sæ-
finnur of the sixteen shoes,’ were con-
sidered to be the lowest class of people
in the town.
There were also instances of people
falling into the river and even drowning,
many of course while drunk. As often
before and after, drink was a scourge in
Iceland—and one of the current argu-
ments against reopening the river is that
it may put drunken people in peril.
SAILING FROM TJÖRNIN
TO THE OCEAN
But there are also happier memories.
One of them is a description in ‘Gven-
dur Jóns,’ a wonderful children’s book
recounting the experiences of a group of
boys trying to sail on a boat from Tjörnin
to the sea, hiding under the small bridg-
es so they wouldn’t be stopped. The book
was written by a very interesting man,
Hendrik Ottósson. Born in 1897, he
became a fervent socialist when he was
young. He went to Moscow for a Komin-
tern assembly as early as 1919, meeting
many of the luminaries of the commu-
nist movement.
But when Stalinism took over he was
not considered reliable enough. He mar-
ried a Jewish fugitive to save her from
the Nazis, and when the British forces
occupied Iceland in 1940 he volunteered
to work for them as an intelligence agent
despite his communist past—this was
the time of the Hitler/Stalin pact—such
was his loathing of Nazism.
Hendrik Ottósson’s books about the
exploits of a group of boys in the western
part of Reykjavík and around the harbor
in the first years of the 20th century are
classics—but sadly they are a bit forgotten.
THE ELITE’S SCHOOL
The most famous building in Lækjargata
is the old Reykjavík college. The school
claims that its origins lie as far back as
1056, when a school was established at
the bishop’s seat in Skálholt. It was moved
to Reykjavík in 1786 and its present build-
ing was built in 1846. The school was for-
merly referred to as The Latin School, but
know it is called Menntaskólinn í Reykja-
vík—or simply MR. Now it is just a nor-
mal junior college, a school among other
schools, but for a long time it used to be
the place where the country’s elite got its
education—and its self image. Most of
the prime ministers and presidents of
Iceland studied there. There has always
been a certain element of snobbishness
surrounding MR—and there are instanc-
es of men never really graduating from it.
Among its students are two Nobel
Prize winners, although neither of them
can be considered a model pupil. One is
Niels Finsen, a Faeroese/Danish physi-
cian who received the prize for medicine
in 1903. He was by no means an out-
standing student. The other is Halldór K.
Laxness who got the Nobel Prize in litera-
ture in 1955. Indeed, Laxness was a drop
out—he left the school at age seventeen,
never to return.

THE SPRING OF NATIONS
There are famous episodes in the history
of the building. The most quoted is a
meeting between the newly resurrected
parliament and the Danish authorities
in 1851, when the Icelanders, led by inde-
pendence hero Jón Sigur!sson, revolted,
shouting: "We all protest!"
Another incident was influenced by
the revolutionary movements in Europe
in 1848, known in some countries as the
Spring of Nations. This episode is gener-
ally referred to as the pereat. The school
authorities wanted to force the students
to join an abstinence club. They consid-
ered this an infringement on their per-
sonal freedom and reacted by shouting
the latin word "pereat"—perish—at the
schoolmaster, Sveinbjörn Egilsson. He
retired after the incident and died not
long after. Otherwise Sveinbjörn was a
gentle humanist, much admired, who
translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into
beautiful Icelandic—the translations are
considered to be absolute gems—as well
as writing lovely children’s poems that
are still recited.
It is an irony that Steingrímur Thor-
steinsson, one of the leaders of the
pereat, who promptly got kicked out of
school, later became a schoolmaster of
MR himself—as well as being a poet and
a translator of Shakespeare and the ‘One
Thousand And One Nights’ anthology.
BAKER’S HILL TURNS INTO
‘FLEECE STREET’
A little north of MR you will find a row
of old houses, generally referred to as
Bernhöftstorfan, named after the bak-
ery of Bernhöft that once stood on the
corner. At that time Bankastræti (“Bank
Street”), which runs down the hill to
Lækjargata, was named Bakarabrekka
(“Baker’s Hill”). Now it is jokingly re-
ferred to as ‘Fleece Street’ due to the
numerous shops selling outdoor cloth-
ing for tourists that have sprung up in
the last years. After the collapse of 2008,
f leece is more popular in Iceland than
the hated banks.
The houses in the Bernhöftstorfa are
some of the oldest ones in Reykjavík,
built in an old Scandinavian style. For a
long time the city authorities wanted to
remove all that remained of old Reykja-
vík, and there were plans to tear down
these houses and build a modernist
structure instead. It was not until the
late 1970s that the houses were finally
saved and rebuilt, after protests, led by
(among others) Vigdís Finnbogadóttir,
who later became President of Iceland.
THE WALL AND THE FATHER-IN-
LAW OF EUROPE
If you cross Bankastræti towards the
north you will find a rather small but
dignified house, built in a very Danish
style. This is the office of the Prime Min-
ister, and its current resident is Social
Democrat Jóhanna Sigur!ardóttir. The
house was built in 1759, originally as a
prison, commonly referred to as Múrinn
(“The Wall”). At that time most Icelan-
dic criminals—those who were not ex-
ecuted—were sent to do hard labour at
the Bremerholm Prison in Copenhagen.
The house later became the seat of the
Danish governor. It was there that the
sovereignty of Iceland was proclaimed
on December 1, 1918, a rather sombre
day, for the Spanish influenza had rav-
aged the town, killing a lot of people.
There are two statues in front of the
house. One is of Hannes Hafstein, the
first Icelandic Prime Minister, and there
is also a statue of a man with something
in his hand. Some children think it
might be a gun, to others it seems like
a rolled up newspaper. But, no, this is
the Danish king, Christian IX, handing
the first constitution to Iceland in 1874,
on the thousand year anniversary of the
settlement of the country. "With a scroll
of freedom in his fatherly hand," as it says
Words
Egill Helgason
Photo
Lækjargata 2-14, 1907-1912
Lækjargata 2-14, 2011 / Julia Staples
Will 101 Reykjavík Ever Reclaim Its River?
Lækjargata, Tjörnin and ‘the elite’s school’ examined...
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