Books, Arts & Manners: Arctic Charms

When it IS hot in New York, as it is now, I think with longing of North Norway, one of my favorite places on earth. And yet summer above the Arctic Circle is by no means cold, since the sun shines brightly in the extremely clear air; for once, I wore dark glasses to soften the glare. On one of my trips I was inspired to see the very beginning of the Iron Curtain: the border between Norway and the Soviet Union. (The next place where the West and the Soviet Union touch, without satellite nations in between, is a long way away, on the Turkish border.)

Norway and the Soviet Union share a common frontier of some eighty miles in a countryside idyllic with lakes, rivers, small stony mountains, and hills festooned with clusters of birches and aspen. The last town in Norway is Kirkenes: a small, pleasant, civilized place, with a good hotel, nice shops, libraries, and brightly painted wooden houses—very much like a Midwestern town settled by Scandinavians, and, needless to say, spotlessly clean. As in all of North Norway, the town looks amazingly new, with nary a prewar building, which strikes one as very strange if you know that North Norway’s history goes back for centuries. What happened was that the Germans destroyed these towns when they retreated in 1944. The Russians liberated Kirkenes in a well-behaved and charitable way in October 1944, and the inhabitants came out of the mines (Kirkenes is a small mining town) where they had hidden to escape the horrors of the German retreat.

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Nika Hazelton

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When it IS hot in New York, as it is now, I think with longing of North Norway, one of my favorite places on earth. And yet summer above the Arctic Circle is by no means cold, since the sun shines brightly in the extremely clear air; for once, I wore dark glasses to soften the glare. On one of my trips I was inspired to see the very beginning of the Iron Curtain: the border between Norway and the Soviet Union. (The next place where the West and the Soviet Union touch, without satellite nations in between, is a long way away, on the Turkish border.)

Norway and the Soviet Union share a common frontier of some eighty miles in a countryside idyllic with lakes, rivers, small stony mountains, and hills festooned with clusters of birches and aspen. The last town in Norway is Kirkenes: a small, pleasant, civilized place, with a good hotel, nice shops, libraries, and brightly painted wooden houses—very much like a Midwestern town settled by Scandinavians, and, needless to say, spotlessly clean. As in all of North Norway, the town looks amazingly new, with nary a prewar building, which strikes one as very strange if you know that North Norway’s history goes back for centuries. What happened was that the Germans destroyed these towns when they retreated in 1944. The Russians liberated Kirkenes in a well-behaved and charitable way in October 1944, and the inhabitants came out of the mines (Kirkenes is a small mining town) where they had hidden to escape the horrors of the German retreat.