Our packed day in Oslo that had seen us visit the incredible Vigeland Park, the Holmenkollbakken Ski Jump, and both the maritime museum and the folk museum came to an end with a little bit of time to explore on foot if we wanted. Sky Princess was docked right alongside Akershus Fortress in the port but we weren’t sure how much there was to see there and knew we didn’t have a huge amount of time so figured we might leave it for another day to do it justice. Instead, we had a short stroll along the waterside, enjoying a little of the street art that decorated the area first, and admiring the ship’s prow. When you cruise a lot, you find yourself admiring a ship’s prow a lot.
One particular item in Oslo port a very short walk from the ship away that’s definitely worth a look at, and worth taking a moment to consider its meaning, is the artwork variously known as either Vacant Chairs or A Place of Remembrance. This monument is by Antony Gormley and is a memorial to the deported Jews of Norway. The chairs represent typical Norwegian chairs of singles and couples lacking any resting place, and face outwards to the fjord which would be the last thing of Norway that many Jews would see ever again. We’ve seen several artworks by Gormley when we’ve travelled, but these have been the most poignant.
It remained overcast as Sky Princess finally left Oslo, bringing the land portion parts of this cruise to an end. Our smooth passage along the Oslofjord would take us past Bygdøy where we’d been earlier in the day to visit a couple of museums, and high on the hill overlooking the Norwegian capital we could see the ski jump too. You’ll be able to make that out in the photos below that show the hill in the distance.
Another fortress that might be on a list of places to visit should we ever return to Oslo with more in the way of free time is Oscarsborg Fortress, located on a couple of islets in the fjord. You can see some of the gun batteries in the pictures below. This fortress is located in a great spot to defend the fjord and was fitted with underwater-launching torpedo tubes in the early part of the twentieth century. When the Germans invaded Norway in 1940 they approached Oslo up the fjord, knowing about the fortress but underestimating its by-then quite old defensive capabilities; the Germans lost a heavy cruiser and turned back for a while to regroup, which gave time for the Norwegian king and government to escape immediate capture.
There’s just one more post in this Sky Princess cruise travelogue series to come, where I’ll cover some of the evening’s activities and the following sea day’s activities, plus give some final thoughts about the cruise and its itinerary as a whole.