Virtual Vacation!
We visited the Skógar Museum in/on Iceland on 1 July 2019. It ‘preserves the cultural heritage of the Vestur-Skaftafellssýsla region in the form of old buildings, tools and equipment used at land and sea, crafts, books, manuscripts and documents.’
There is much more information and lots of great photos available online, for when you plan your own trip to Iceland.
The Pamphlet available at the Museum is very well done and contains much of the information below. I took all the photos.
It has three parts: a folk museum that has agricultural and fishery tools, boats and maritime gear, textiles and costumes, musical instruments, rare books and manuscripts, and natural history exhibits. Plus, artifacts from Viking days. It also has a marvellous very old fishing boat, I didn't get a photo of it because several people were in the way.
Tools in the folk museum
Traditional dress in the Folk Museum
Something odd in the Folk Museum, this is a whale vertebrae that was hollowed out and used as a cask.
An Open Air Museum, where you can both look at and go inside a traditional turf farmstead, a 19th-century gabled farm home, one of the first wooden buildings in Iceland, a home built from driftwood, a multidenominational church assembled from 16 regional churches, and a miniature turf home for elves.
It is really interesting to see how Icelanders lived all those centuries ago in buildings made from turf and stone.
The Museum of Transport and Communication has a collection of automobiles, trucks, highway machinery, and telecommunication, radio, and rescue team equipment used over the last century, it is fascinating, everything from early snowmobiles and radios to current technology.
The Turf Farm: as in houses built from turf, the parlor dates from 1896, bedroom from 1838, pantry from about 1850, kitchen from about 1880, baðstofa (communal room where the household slept, ate and worked) from 1895, storehouse from 1830, cattle shed from about 1880, smithy from about 1950.
Baðstofa, the communal room where the household slept, ate and worked, was built over the cattle shed to benefit from the warmth of the animals. The kitchen and parlor are in the front section of the house. The storehouse, from Gröf, Skaftártunga, dates from about 1870
The Farmhouse from Skál, Síða, was built in 1919-20; it was reconstructed at Skógar Museum in 1989. The house was lived in until 1970.
The House of Holt was built entirely of driftwood in 1878 by the Regional Commissioner. It is the house on the left of the picture behind the turf shed was the first timber house in Vestur-Skaftafellssýsla. The wall panels in the west room are from the wreck of the hospital ship St. Paul, from 1899. The house was lived in until 1974 and rebuilt at Skógar in 1980.
Skógar was a church site from shortly after the adoption of Christianity in Iceland around 1000 AD; the first church was built in about 1100 and dedicated to St. Nicholas. In the early centuries, Skógar Church was wealthy, but after the Reformation of 1550, it declined. The last church at Skógar was a modest wooden church built in the mid-19th century and demolished in 1890.
This picture is from a different museum. Bed-boards were first used in the 17th century. The board was placed at the side of the bed during the night. As beds were usually shared by more than one person, they were crowded, and the bed-board ensured that no one fell out of bed. In the communal living, sleeping and working room, there was no heating but body heat. During the day, the bed-board was removed and the bed was used as seating. Bed-boards were often carved with the owner’s initials, a date or a prayer, in ornamental “head lettering.”
