Some weeks ago, while visiting a friend in Denmark, I went to a historical village in the Jutland town of Aarhus.
Den Gamle By (literally ‘the old town’) is a collection of real-life historic buildings from all over Denmark. Each was carefully deconstructed, carried in pieces back to Aarhus, and then reconstructed. A smattering of shops, houses, and various businesses (blacksmith, cobbler, tailor, etc.), together these buildings represent roughly four centuries of Danish history, dating from the 1550s all the way to the 1970s. These kinds of open-air museums are fairly common and popular, but the amount of painstaking effort and love that went into Den Gamle By is extraordinary.
I don’t just mean that the buildings and objects are extraordinary (although the degree of preservation and authenticity is breathtaking). More than this, the village as a whole is special because it is imbued with life. Women dressed in 18th garb sell pastries, geese and chickens strut beside the stream, and a 1950s café serves great coffee.
At first, the cynic in me was quick to dismiss these personal touches as mere reenactors in costume, part of the show for tourists. And there is certainly some of that going on here: there are historical actors meant to answer questions and look interesting. But as you walk around, the history feels less and less like a performance. I noticed – after my Danish friend’s prodding – that many of the people who visit aren’t tourists at all, but local residents. Ordinary people, young and old, student and pensioner, come by for an amble stroll or a quiet corner to read.
The problem with many historical villages is that they exist apart from their communities, like a plastic flamingo in a garden. Here, in Aarhus, it is as if the surrounding town has enveloped the history, and likewise the history has woven its way into the town.
On their own, the older buildings from earlier centuries were wonderful. For a proud card-carrying history nut, I found the whole aesthetic absolutely charming. There were whole houses in perfect condition, structured and furnished exactly as they would have been hundreds of years ago. There were family dinner tables with surprisingly comfortable benches, cramped bedrooms of scant decoration, awkwardly painted staircases and door frames meant to resemble expensive marble. And there were countless objects: books, combs, plates, dolls, chairs, chests, mirrors, carpets, loose papers, brooms, vials, glasses, and everything else needed or wanted in the course of day. It was awesome to bask in the sheer normalcy of it all.
Then you got to the 1970s apartments. This was almost spooky. Not only was each a faithful example of how people in the ‘70s lived, but each was carefully modeled and designed to copy a specific apartment occupied by a specific Danish family. Some of them were even filled with furniture and family photographs donated from relatives, who then helped arrange the furniture as it had stood in the past. These apartments were therefore time capsules, apartments that people had actually grown up in that were now frozen in time. You walk around and you forget that you’re in a museum; you just feel like you’re in someone’s home.
Maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe every historical village has something like this.
But in the soup of personal objects and past lives that filled those apartments, I forgot myself. I forgot where I was and why I came. I leaned back in a comfy chair in what was once some teenager’s room, and I tried to see it as my own, or as something that could have been my own. Never before had memory had such a profound spatial quality. Never before would I have said that I lived, however briefly, twenty years before my birth.
Then you depart, walking down the steps out of the building and back out into the street. You see towers of modern Aarhus off to your left but turn right. You walk back down the brick to stone to dirt path towards the earlier centuries. With each step the buildings get lower, brown beams emerge from the walls, thatch appears and old overhanging metal signs too.
That’s when the whiplash sets in. Moving so rapidly from one world to the next almost brings on chronological queasiness. The whole experience is terribly difficult to put into words. But I think seeing all the changes time brings, captured in the changing physical scenery of human life, makes our own era feel much more malleable, almost adrift.
Den Gamle By reminded me that nothing is pinned down; nothing is fixed to a ‘then’ or ‘now.’ The living rooms of one age are the museum exhibits of the next.
All this might come off as a discomforting, almost unpleasant experience. Surely we all like to feel time as we do the ground; steady, unmoving, that most constant point of reference.
But the sensation of time slipping from under your feet and spinning you in circles was more humbling and illuminating than unpleasant. I now catch myself, sometimes, gazing at the baubles and flotsam around my house, wondering about the form of a residential block or the assumptions of our most hallowed institutions.
In looking, I try to adopt that curious wonder and puzzled confusion later generations most surely will.
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