My posts about the Nordik House (Faroes and Iceland) and the Culture House (Reykjavík) were intended to be followed by this one on the National Museum of the Faroes, but somehow I just forgot about it! Today I correct this slip.
The museum is in the north-eastern outskirts of Tórshavn, far from downtown, but a bus took me there on September 2, 2017 from the city center (for free! I do not know if all public buses are free or only some of them). I informed the driver of my destination, and he gently stopped there and instructed me about how to approach the building from the bus stop.
The building seems anything but a museum at all, as you see in this photo of the front facade:
And this is the view at the other side from the museum’s cafeteria:
I got a funny general impression: a museum is always interesting, and this one was indeed, displaying valuable information on things like the natural history of the islands, or the historically critical role of fishing for their economy, while it was also, nevertheless, a very simple, old-fashioned, low-technology museum:
But in the basement it hides an absolute first class cultural and historical treasure, wonderfully displayed in a room specially dedicated, which from the very begining was my aim in coming to this place: a large selection of the wooden church fittings that were once extracted from the medieval episcopal residence of Kirkjubøur during an extense renovation. They are considered to be the greatest Faroese national treasure. A gem that by itself is absolutely worth the excursion to this remote and somehow bizarre cultural venue:
