Bryggen Museum

Jason and I dashed (literally ran) into the Bryggen Museum to avoid the downpour!  The Bryggen Museum is right next to the UNESCO Heritage Site row houses.  It is about the history of the row houses and the Bergen area.

The bottom floor is the permanent exhibit.  Like most major towns, Bergen had a number of major fires.  Each time, the town rebuilt on top of the remains of the previous one, so Bergen today is ~6 feet higher than the earlier settlements.  Given this, the Bergen museum, encloses some of the earlier foundations which the rebuilds had covered.  They also had a number of artifacts that had been discovered like shoes and tools.  

The upper floor was an exhibit focused on "Great Fire of 1916."  It started as when a few storage workers lit a candle to see in the dark, but unfortunately, it caught spark on the goods in the warehouse.  The Bergen city government took advantage of this horrible misfortune to redesign Bergen into the modern city it is today.  At the time, they broadened roads, added town squares, etc.  They had photographs of the fire at the time.  

This museum did a great job setting the context of the Bryggen row houses and Bergen city as a whole.

Time in museum: 1 hr
Times visited: 1
Overall: B+

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