BERGEN, NORWAY
When the rays are glittering across Bergen harbor on a sunny summer day, the fish market, or fisketorget, seems literally to sparkle as visitors and locals gather
shop, browse, and eat. The hub of this bustling port city for several hundred years, this famous market is full of stands heaped high with delights of the sea and that Scandinavian favorite, deep-hued gravadlax
Bergen’s history stretches back as far as the 11th century, and in its heyday it was a headquarters for the Hanseatic League – northern Europe’s dominating trade alliance in the late Middle Ages. The league was made up of German and Scandinavian seafaring merchants, and the legacy of the German merchants can still be experienced in the oldest, most charming of the city’s neighborhoods, known as Bryggen. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979, the 62 gently leaning wooden merchants’ houses here have been lovingly restored to their former glory, and wandering among these rickety antique houses is like entering a wooden maze. Several have been opened up as museums, while others sell typical Norwegian handicrafts, from fluffy knitwear to ornate Sami reindeer-bone knives. Fish has always played a vital role in Bergen – it was responsible for drawing the Hanseatic League to the town’s shores in the 13th century, at around the same time that one of Norway’s national dishes par excellence, gravadlax, appeared on the culinary scene. This signature dish, today most often served as an appetizer, was invented by fishermen, who would salt and then bury their freshly caught salmon, leaving it to ferment in the sand at high tide. “Grav” literally means “grave,” and “burying” the salmon gave it a very distinctive flavor. These days you won’t see any Norwegians digging up their dish of the day from the beaches, but gravadlax remains just as tasty, having been “buried” and cured in a marinade of salt, sugar, dill, and often a dash of aquavit or gin. Much has changed in Bergen since the fish-trading of the Middle Ages, but the scene at the fish market is every bit as lively, as gregarious sellers vie for customers against the backdrop of the Hanseatic houses. Stands are piled high with bright orange or pink gravadlax, smoked salmon, rosy shrimp, purple lobsters, red crayfish, and apricot-colored mussels. Open sandwiches stacked with fish and seafood call out to be eaten from improvised cafés with rustic wooden benches. It’s not hard to imagine a merchant in the Middle Ages tucking into the same dishes on the same spot some 600 years ago.

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