Step into medieval Bergen with Bryggens Museum

By Celina Tran | Photos: Bymuseet i Bergen

Framed by its seven hallmark mountains and spilling into a harbour that opens toward the North Sea, Bergen is a city where nature, culture, and history come together. Norway’s second-largest city has the vibrancy of a modern hub but never lets you forget its thousand-year story.

When people think of Bergen, they instantly imagine themselves at the harbour. Here, at the Fish Market, just steps from the waterfront, stalls brim with the catch of the day: glossy salmon, piles of shrimp, and steaming seafood ready to be tasted. This is where you will find the wooden houses, with façades painted in reds, yellows, and ochres that glow even on Bergen’s famously rainy days (of which there are many).

This beautiful wharf – now a UNESCO World Heritage Site – has been the city’s beating heart since the Middle Ages. Once the stronghold of Hanseatic merchants, its wooden buildings have survived fire, time and change, to remain Bergen’s most iconic landmark. But to understand Bryggen, you need to go below the surface, into the stories literally buried in its soil.

Leather shoes.

Life beneath the surface

In 1955, when flames tore through Bergen and part of Bryggen, many feared it was the end of this historic quarter. What followed was one of Northern Europe’s most remarkable archaeological projects. Over 13 years, layer by layer, archaeologists uncovered the remains of medieval buildings and hundreds of thousands of objects that had slipped into the earth. Shoes, pots, tools, even scraps of clothing – things so ordinary that they might have seemed unremarkable at the time – became extraordinary clues to the past. Their discovery gave birth to Bryggens Museum in 1976, which has since become a keeper of the city’s most human stories.

Wooden spoons and bowl.

“The permanent exhibition includes everything from worn-out shoes, broken pottery shards, fragments of clothing, and other everyday objects that give us unique insights into the lives of people who lived in Bergen hundreds of years ago,” says lecturer Knut Høiaas.

The museum’s main exhibition, Under Ground, is less about kings and battles and more about shoemakers, merchants, women, and children who lived here 800 years ago. Worn-out shoes whisper of long days on muddy streets. Broken pottery reveals what people cooked, ate, and drank. A child’s lost toy still seems to wait for small hands to pick it up again.

Rune sticks.

“Well-preserved evidence of life from the Middle Ages and other historical periods isn’t necessarily rare, but more often than not, they often belong to those of the ruling classes. The interesting thing about many of the finds at Bryggens Museum is that they belonged to the common man at the time,” says Høiaas.

Perhaps most captivating are the runic inscriptions: wooden slips etched with words that bring the medieval world startlingly close. Some are practical – such as receipts for goods or tally marks for trade. Others are more personal, think love poems, fragments of gossip, even magical charms against bad luck. Together, they show that medieval Bergeners were not faceless figures from the past, but people with worries, humour and dreams, not unlike our own.

Rings.

“We have the world’s largest collection of runic inscriptions, featuring everything from receipts and poems to gossip and magical spells,” says Høiaas. “There’s a message from a certain Gyda telling – whom we suspect to be – her husband to come home.”

One of the rarest treasures is the Guddal-garment, a thousand-year-old wool tunic that once kept its owner warm against the coastal winds. Standing before it, you are struck by how tangible the connection feels. One cannot help but imagine how an ordinary person, living in this same city centuries ago, wore this very fabric.

“One of my personal favourites inscriptions is a very sweet one that reads ‘Åsbjørg, the best child’. There’s also another, a so-called birth helper, a type of Christian magical inscription that was to help pregnant women before birth,” says Høiaas. “I often imagine this woman as she clutches onto this object, praying the birth will go well, a situation many women today also go through. Something about these objects create a link between us in the present and those very real people who lived in Bergen in the past.”

Bergen is a city of layers, and Bryggens Museum peel all those back to reveal the ordinary, fragile, daily lives that once unfolded here. It is not just a museum of artifacts, but a reminder that the past is never far away.

Step into medieval Bergen with Bryggens Museum

Archeological site.

Web: www.bymuseet.no/museum/bryggens-museum
Facebook: Bymuseet i Bergen
Instagram: @bymuseetibergen

In addition to the permanent exhibition, the museum hosts temporary displays on a wide variety of themes. In 2025 and 2026, visitors can experience ten magnificent tapestries created by textile artist Ragna Breivik from Fana. Woven over a period of more than 25 years, the tapestries are inspired by the medieval ballad of Åsmund Frægdagjeva.

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