What is the origin of the name of the town Ísafjörður?
It’s story time.
Clive Clothear approached the obvious local standing by the frigid water’s edge. “Hey there, buddy!” he said cheerfully.
“My name is not Buddy,” replied the sour-faced man feeding the last of the fishing net through his calloused hands, checking for signs of fraying. “I am Sigurdur Jon Egilsson, although our surnames are patronymic so…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about the patronimmy whatsit. Been told it enough on this trip. Seems like everyone in Iceland wants to mention it. Anyway, pal, I’m making a map so can you tell me the name of that over there?”
Sigurdur took a breath, held it for a second, calmed himself, then looked where he thought the American was pointing. “That is a fjord, duh! I thought everyone knew this!”
“Isafjordur. Got it. Only you’ve probably got some funny letters and everything. I’ll make some changes later. Cheers, chum. Onto the next town.”
Sigurdur watched Clive leave and only slowly did realisation come to the Icelandic man’s mind. Town? he thought. Oh no. He stepped to where the American had been standing and looking along the fjord to the small grouping of buildings. He had wanted the name of the town.
“The people of Ísatownnotafjörður are not going to be happy about this,” he told himself quietly.
We had arrived in Ísafjörður, the second port in Iceland on our Sky Princess 2022 Norway and Iceland cruise.
Now, you might think with all the travelling that we do, that we do a lot of research into the places we’re going to visit. We generally don’t. Given that we often will only be in places for a short time we will most frequently look to see what are the popular things to do in a given location, or we’ll look for obscure alternatives to the popular things just to be different, or we’ll look to see what excursions to nearby attractions there might be. And if there’s nothing else then we’ll check out where the pubs might be so that a walk around can include them. Ísafjörður offered us nothing obvious to see in the town, and it also offered nothing we really wanted to take an excursion for (we like a waterfall, for instance, but we’d seen two the day before in Goðafoss And Geitafoss), but it also seemed from the first look at the map to not even have a pub we could spot. More on this later, but to start with we resigned ourselves to simply hopping off the ship and having a bit of a walk for the views. It’s always nice to get ashore when on a cruise, and we always try to do so when it’s somewhere we’ve not been before.
Had we decided to spend the day on board Sky Princess instead of heading ashore, here’s what might have kept us entertained.
Since sail away from Ísafjörður wasn’t until late we knew we could have a bit of a lie-in, a late breakfast, enjoy some morning trivia, then think about visiting the town. This would also give the town a bit of a chance to wake up and open up anything of interest because opening hours, even in summer, aren’t something to simply make assumptions about in this part of the world.
Ísafjörður was a tender port so giving people on excursions a chance to head ashore first made sense, but we were Elite level loyalty with Princess Cruises at this point so it wouldn’t have made any difference. We simply headed down to our Elite boarding area and were immediately directed to jump ahead of anyone else waiting.
There’s no getting away from it: a cold, grey day does not paint Ísafjörður in the best light, but I can’t imagine a bright, warm, sunny day would have improved things much. It’s a very practical place, a very no-frills place, a very concrete place. I quite liked it.
We’d seen a couple of minor potential points of interest around the town in the form of a waterfall some way from it, but easily doable given the amount of time we had in port, and a viewing platform. Our not-really-a-plan-as-such was to head in the general direction of both and see if we wanted to pursue those options once we’d got a feel for the land and conditions.
The surprisingly yellow Lutheran church in Ísafjörður just past the more industrialised port area did not appear to be open to visitors, which was a shame for three reasons: firstly, it would have been nice to see the architecture inside as the exterior design had an air of the Sydney Opera House about it; secondly, there are apparently a lot of clay birds above the altar of the church; thirdly, it was bastardly cold. Ísafjörður’s climate is classified as tundra, and we had no reason to disbelieve it.
If you visit a port in a Nordic country then at some point you will find a statue to fishermen who’ve lost their lives at sea providing for the people on land. Ísafjörður is no exception.
Ísafjörður Culture House is the former hospital for the town. Following six years of dithering over council budgets, the building was eventually built and opened in 1925. At the time it was the most impressive hospital building in Iceland. These days it houses a library and several museum rooms. The lawn in front of the building housed a few interesting art sculptures and it was all bordered to the west by rather colourful houses.
We could see people heading towards what was the viewing platform, and for a while we followed them, but became increasingly aware that the ground was about to rise steeply. Clouds were descending and covering the tops of the ranges of hills, and with my wife not having the best track record with steep climbs anyway, we figured we might just give up on our plan to see either of the two potential sites of interest we’d originally identified.
Circling around with an intention to make our way back towards the tender boat area after a short side-trip to photograph some street art we’d spotted as we’d disembarked one earlier, we came upon Jónsgarður, a small park or garden on a slightly elevated area of the town. Small is the operative word here, but it was fairly nice for a compact spot of greenery and occasional wood carvings. The modernist building just below the garden, with a nice little water feature in front, and with views across the roundabout to the church, was the new hospital that replaced that which had occupied the culture house.
Some photos of the Skutulsfjörður fjord now as we shuffled along in the icy temperatures towards the industrial area of the town.
So, at this point we had figured that we’d seen all there was to see in Ísafjörður and we should simply catch the tender boat back to the ship, enjoy some luxury and relative warmth aboard, that sort of thing. But I pulled out my phone to look at the map again as we entered the roads of warehouses and concrete buildings and suddenly spotted a few museums that we’d not noticed before for some reason. And they were open. Perfect, we thought. Even if they’re terrible museums, it means we spend a little money locally and eat up some more time.
They were not terrible museums at all. In fact, following this trip, one of them just happens to be now rated our favourite museum in the world! You can read about that in the next part of this cruise travelogue series.