Sigthseeing with Gregers

A tour through Copenhagen with Gregers Dirckinck-Holmfeld

The tour will take you through the inner harbour of Copenhagen – København in Danish, the name being originally composed of two words: “Købmand” for merchant and “havn” for harbour. The harbour of the merchants.

To day you see no merchants and very little commercial business in the inner harbour. In stead of this you get a brilliant impression of all the central buildings of the royal capital of Denmark, covering quite a small area. Through almost a thousand years everything has been concentrated around the harbour of Copenhagen; The royal palaces, the government buildings, the headquarters of the army and the marine, the stock exchange etc.

Sailing through the canals you pass – to mention a few places of great historical and architectural interest: The national gallery, which is the former Prince´s Palais, the Thorvaldsen Museum, which houses the collections of Danish sculpturer Thorvaldsen, The Christiansborg Castle, being to day the House of Parlament, the stock exchange, built in the 16th century and crowned by the strange tower of two enormous dragontails winded around each other. Another tower of amazing construction is Our Saviours Church with a winding outward staircase mounting to very top.

In another part of the inner harbour we shall pass close to the present royal domicile, the Amalienborg Castle, four rococo palaces around an octagonal square, considered one of the architectural wonders of Europa, with the equestrian statue of the king Frederic V by the French sculpturer Sally.

Facing the palace square on the other side of the harbour you see the new Royal Opera House under construction, financed by a private donation from the owner of the shipping company Maersk and designed by the architect Henning Larsen, internationally known for e.g. the Foreign Ministery in Yeddah, Saudi Arabia. The Opera House will be inaugurated in 2005.

Close to the Royal Palace many of the 18th century commercial storehouses from the colonial epoch have been restored for private residence, hotel or museal purposes. From the window of a gable room of one of them the regent crownprince Frederic VI in 1802 surveyed the naval battle against the british navy commanded by Lord Nelson turning into a fatal Danish surrender.

All of the harbour bares witness both to the history of the kingdom and to the present development of Copenhagen into a new cultural centre of Scandinavia. Stretching from impressive new architecture to “Christiania”, which we shall also pass – the anarchist housing area of the ancient ramparts still in existence since 1972, protected by a human, democratic legislation, which we consider very Danish. Other people may say: Lax. To them we shall defend our laxity by all means.

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