Reykjavík is Old Norse for “smokey bay,” named for steam rising up from the geothermal vents found across the island. Although I did not visit any hot springs, my vision of the city was smokey, dark, misty. During the day, it was either nighttime or raining or both.
In November 2021, on my first solo trip in a while, I spent a 48-hour extended layover in Reykjavík. I walked over 20 miles throughout Iceland’s capital city on the Faxaflói Bay, exploring as many streets, neighborhoods, and museums (seven) as my legs and watch allowed. It was the middle of the night (6am) when I landed at Keflavík Airport and it was still pitch dark after I checked into the hotel and set out to explore at 9am. At the Tjörnin, a pond adjacent to the City Hall, swans and ducks floated and splashed about. It was surreal to see birds so active before the dawn, but even they have to get their days going at some point.
At actual nighttime, I slept in the exact location that the first Icelandic settlers called home. My hotel in the city center was situated immediately above an archaeological site and subterranean museum, The Settlement Exhibition Reykjavík 871±2. Underground, under the street, under the hotel, are the remains of a Viking longhouse. One of the first buildings in Iceland, the longhouse was inhabited during the Settlement Age, around 930-1000 AD, and excavated in 2001. A stone wall at the site dated to 871±2 is one of the earliest features of the Icelandic built environment. The wall is dated by tephrochronology; a layer of tephra (volcanic ash) sits between the wall and subsequent settlement layers, deposited by a volcanic eruption at Torfajökull. Ash from the eruption reached Greenland glaciers and has been precisely dated via ice cores. It is likely that some Irish monks arrived on the island decades earlier than Viking settlement, but Iceland has no indigenous population.
Many of the photographs in this album are taken of or from the top of the Hallgrímskirkja. The largest church and one of the tallest buildings in the country, Hallgrímskirkja is an Expressionist Neo-Gothic church designed by Guðjón Samúelsson. The church was commissioned in 1937, construction started in 1945, and it was finished in 1986, decades after the architect passed away. Samúelsson (1887-1950) was the State Architect of Iceland from 1920 and the first Icelander educated in architecture. He also designed the Neo-Gothic Landakotskirkja, the cathedral of the Catholic Church in Iceland consecrated in 1929. The Lutheran Hallgrímskirkja was built taller than originally intended in order to surpass the height of the Catholic cathedral.
I walked for miles along the coast in the stinging rain and wind to the Sigurjón Ólafsson Museum to discover that it was closed. Instead, I walked around the museum grounds to see the Icelandic sculptor’s outdoor works and ate a sandwich sitting on some rotting planks leaning against a wooden shed on a rocky cliff looking out at the bay. I had more luck at other museums and visited the National Museum of Iceland, the National Gallery of Iceland, and two locations of the Reykjavík Art Museum at Kjarvalsstaðir and Hafnarhús… as well as the Icelandic Phallological Museum which boasts the world’s largest collection of its kind.
Below is a map of Iceland in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, considered to be the first modern atlas. The cartographer Abraham Ortelius compiled and published the atlas in 1570; this print from a later edition, circa 1587. Zoom in to explore!
