A visit to the 'Den Gamle By' (The Old Town) is just like stepping into a Chinese nest of boxes, where you can open one room after the other and push deeper and deeper into the past. As a visitor you can stroll through the old Danish market town and look at the buildings and the life of the town.
If you feel like it, you can also journey back in time and speak with the people of yesteryear. In the street, the organ grinder provides entertainment, while the vicar is about to preach the Word of God, and the yard-hand tips his cap politely. You can follow him to the Merchant's House, where the kitchen maid in 1864 is rummaging in the kitchen, and in another kitchen the shoemaker’s wife of 1840 is serving thick rye-bread soup with salt-herring. You can see the men working in several of the workshops, and if you want to go shopping in one of the Old Town’s shops, the girl in the Baker's Shop or the shop assistant will ask politely with smile: ”And how may I help Sir or Madam today?”
Year of celebration
The 'Den Gamle By' (The Old Town) is a museum of Living History where current experience is used to present the past.
”If it’s amusing, it will open the mind,” is one philosophy of the museum, and 2009 is certainly set for amusement and festivity when the museum celebrates its centenary.
The early stages of the world’s first open-air museum of urban culture were the Danish National Exhibition in Århus in 1909. Peter Holm, Århus teacher and translator, had been put in charge of creating a section of local history, and when he got wind of an old renaissance house in the city, which had been sold to be demolished, the idea emerged as to how this could be put to good use. Despite some resistance, Peter Holm managed to achieve both the support and funds for the careful dismantling and re-erection of the renaissance house at the National Exhibition. It was a great success among the visitors, and after the National Exhibition, the Mayor's House, as the house had been re-named, was moved once again. This time to its present-day location, marking the beginning of The Old Town urban museum.
A fountain of colours
One of the highlights of the year will be the official opening of the Mintmaster's Mansion which has now been erected in the town square. This grand building was originally erected in the 1680s – a period of crises which the population tried to overcome and get safely through by, amongst other things, decking-out their houses in magnificent style, with bursts of colours, ornamentations and fine details to take the mind off the drab monotony of everyday life.
The Mintmaster acquired himself a house which attracts attention indeed – two high-ceilinged storeys on top of a brick-built basement, some 24 metres in length and with a large bay-window on the first floor.
In connection with an urban renewal in Copenhagen during the 1940s, the Mansion was, however, taken down, and stowed away for half a century, until plans to have it re-erected in The Old Town took form in the 1990s.
It now stands here, in all its former glory as it was in the end of the 18th century with lots of details from the baroque period such as painted marble-effects and walls which look like woven tapestries. In those days, illusions and conceits were created in order to stir the imagination, and this is an art which is still very much in evidence in The Old Town where you can stroll right into the arms of history around every corner.