Day 14 – 23 July 2023 – Stavanger

The sea is flat, very calm & nearly windless as we pass some of the small settled islands as we sail into the entrance to the port of Stavanger. There are boats & small ships tied up along the many jetties lining the shore with multi story buildings coming into view. There is a large ship being worked on & many smaller work boats around it. Stavanger is an oil industry support port & the ship seems to be heading into a position that is impossible to turn, there are two small rocky islands & the Captain spins the ship on its axis between these rocky islands with the stern & bow of the ship seemingly not having enough room to avoid hitting them. Then the ship is reversed into what seems a tight space along a vacant pier, it is amazing seamanship watching the ship being manoeuvred so delicately.

We are one of the first tours off the ship & board an electric bus, it is very new & so quite & smooth to travel on. Our first stop is the University of Stavanger Museum of Archeology & they have a special display at the moment on Viking jewellery. There are some amazingly intricate silver & gold jewellery as well as ornamental gilded bronze items. Some of the earliest silver coins date from 800 to 950 A.D. & come from Arabia, Germany, England & Ireland, with three of the coins minted by a Viking King Sitric Silkbeard in Dublin. There are examples of everyday items such as swords, bowls & drinking vessels, including glassware from Rome, with Greek inscriptions from around 300 A.D. The trade & transport links in these times must have been simply amazing. There are also examples of items dating the Iron Age plus some large stones with Runes carved into them. A skeleton called the Viste Boy dates from the Stone Age & is over 8,200 years old. We could have spent a full day in the museum, it is so interesting.

Our next stop is the Swords in the Stone monument, three giant swords mounted into rocks on the shores of Stavanger. These swords commemorate when 29 small kingdoms of Norway were united under one king, Viking King Harald the fairhair in 872 A.D. The legends are that the fighting was fierce & the fjord waters were red with blood. It must have been a good life for a king as one inscription found for the King of fair Fernmag stated that he was entitled to “six polished horns for ale, six shields, six curved swords, six fair women & six sets of chess”.  The swords stand more than 10 metres tall & are quickly surrounded as two busloads from the ship empty out & scatter around the ship & advantageous photo points. We saw one man slip off rocks into the water & drop his phone on the way down, fortunately he did not appear to be injured.

An Iron Age farm is next & here a number of long buildings have been archeologically excavated & the buildings rebuilt on the same foundations. Viking burials were found in the ruins of the buildings & also Bronze Age burial mounds were found on the farm. These longhouses have been furnished for the period & they have done an amazing job, with stone walls & multi-layer bark roof capped with soil & grass.  There are textile looms, grinding stones & farming tools exhibited inside.  There are still burial mound on the site that have not yet been excavated.

The Norwegian Petroleum Museum is an amazing large building that houses the history of petroleum exploration & development since petroleum deposits were found in the Norwegian Sea in the 1960s.  There is a collection of old worn-out drill heads of all shapes & sizes, all very expensive as they were diamond tipped for cutting through layers of rock. The museum has intricate scale models of the various drilling platforms developed over the years plus a full size drilling work head where the long drill bits were continually added as the hole got deeper. A very dangerous job. This museum was a lot more interesting than I had anticipated & our guide had worked in the Norwegian oil industry since the beginning, she was very knowledgeable.

Our walk through old Stavanger was another highlight of our tour. The old narrow cobblestone streets & lanes are surrounded by a mish-mash of old white wooden buildings that have been restored & they are of all shapes & sizes, all squeezed closely together. Apparently these were the homes of merchants, tradesmen & sailors in the old days, built from the 1820s to 1870s, had become very rundown & were an eyesore under consideration for mass demolition. It is great that they have been preserved & restored. The ship is only across the road from when we end our walk so we board the ship for a late lunch. After lunch we walk back through the old Stavanger town then down to the new dock area with the old Cathedral overlooking it. We walk along the lake & admire the white swans, look at all the statues & the Polish tall ship tied up at the dock opposite our cruise ship. The tall ship was here for a tall ships race. There are lots of local walking around & enjoying the warm summer day. We get back on board for dinner around 6pm then watch the ship as it departs port at 11pm. The small rocky islands pass very close by & I marvel again at the skill of the Captain & crew. We walked 7.6kms today. Another great day.