Sverresborg, Trondheim

At Sverresborg there was a ski museum.  For my mother:  Is he real or fake?

Sverresborg was started in the early nineteen hundreds when a fisherman who had been using this 16th century church as a storehouse asked the city of Trondheim if they would like it...they said yes, moved it on to some property at the edge of town and the museum was established.  The site is where King Sverres built a fortress is the way back days, I think around 1000.  The walls at the top of the hill overlooking the current city and harbor are still there...there were some masons clink clink clinking on the walls while we were there.  Since the first church arrived, many other farm houses, barns, outbuilding, cabins, and a whole city square with stores and businesses have been placed on the park grounds.  Some of them are open and furnished and you can go inside.  They even have a "family" (actors) who are going about the daily life activities of a farm family.  When we were there, there were two women in the kitchen making lunch on the wood stove: sausage patties, mashed beets, bread; a man out in yard making logs for a log building, and two children who came running when the lunch bell rang. In another little cabin, a young woman was making flatbread over the fire.  She invited us to try some.  It is made of rye and barley flour and water.  It was tasteless, but as she pointed out, they usually eat it with soup or with butter or jam.  She said they made it only twice a year, at Christmas and in the summer, and stored enough to last them for six months.

The little door in the wall under the fortress is, I am SURE, a troll house door. 

Scott has his hand here on the stave, the upright corner post of the oldest stave church in Norway.  It was built in 1017 as a Catholic church and was converted to a protestant church after the Reformation...in the late 1500's.  Most of the wood is original, they impregnated it with pine pitch to preserve the wood, and it has lasted for 10 centuries!  It is a small dark church, no windows or pews, not very inviting, but SO old...

We ended our fun day with a coffee in the museum coffee shop, just as a tour bus full of noisy, chattering Americans arrived.  We had had the place to ourselves so we felt lucky and were reminded of why we like to travel on our own instead of with a tour group.