Das Wichtigste im Überblick
- Alles und jeder kam mit dem Boot und ging dann hinauf.
- Ein Haus, eine Scheune und genug Gras für ein paar Tiere - und sonst nichts.
- Ein erhaltener Abschnitt des Uferwegs existiert bei Styvi.
- Abandoned across the twentieth century as the arithmetic failed.
What you are looking at
Somewhere in the first twenty minutes the guide will point at a green shelf partway up a wall, and there will be a building on it.
These are farms. Not shelters, not summer huts, but holdings where families lived year-round, on ledges where a glacier happened to leave a bench of workable ground a long way above the water and a long way below the top.
There is no road to any of them. There never was. The fjord was the road, and the ledge was reached from the water by a path that in some cases needed a ladder to finish.
Once you know what they are, you cannot stop finding them. There are far more than anybody points out, and half of them are visible only as a rectangle of brighter green where a field used to be.
The guide matters here more than anywhere else on the trip. Rock and water speak for themselves; a rectangle of brighter green on a ledge does not, and without somebody to say what it was you would go past it entirely.
How a family lived up there
Grass, mainly, and what grass supports. A ledge farm kept goats and sheep, sometimes a cow, and grew hay to feed them through a winter that ran half the year.
The steepness was the whole problem. Hay was cut on slopes too severe to stand on comfortably and carried down by hand or sledged. Animals grazed ground that would frighten a modern walker, which is exactly why there are still goats on these walls.
Fish supplemented everything, because the fjord was in front of the door. Some holdings kept a boat as their only vehicle, and losing it was a serious event.
And the children went to school by boat, rowed out and rowed back, in whatever the fjord was doing that morning. That detail does more to explain these places than any statistic.
Ein grünes Regal über senkrechtem Fels
The old road along the shore
Before roads and engines, this fjord was on the postal route between Bergen and the east, and the post went along the shore on foot and by boat.
A stretch of that old path survives at Styvi, on the eastern shore, preserved and walkable. It is a narrow way cut and built along the waterline, and walking it is the clearest available answer to how people moved through a landscape with vertical sides.
Styvi itself is a farm with a small museum, reachable by boat and on foot along the path from Bleiklindi, and it is the standard destination for people who want to spend a day rather than two hours on this fjord.
From a RIB you pass it. Knowing what it is turns a cluster of buildings into the last surviving piece of the infrastructure that held this place together.
Bakka, and the ones still occupied
Not everything is abandoned. Bakka, a small village on the western shore towards Gudvangen, is still inhabited, with a white timber church that is among the most photographed buildings on the fjord for the simple reason that it is the only building in the frame.
Dyrdal and several other holdings are empty, in the way rural Norway is full of empty: buildings standing, roofs mostly on, fields greener than the forest around them because they were cleared and grazed for centuries.
A few of the ledge farms are used seasonally now, kept up by descendants who come in summer. The livestock economy that justified them is gone, but the buildings and the family connection often are not.
The pattern is the familiar Norwegian one. The population did not vanish; it moved to where there was a road, a school, a shop and a wage.
Undredal, on the Aurlandsfjord side, is the counter-example worth knowing about. It kept enough people to stay a working village, it has a famously small stave church, and it still makes the goat cheese the area is known for. It is what these settlements looked like when they worked.
Mit dem Boot
Jeder Hof an diesen Wänden war vom Wasser aus erreichbar. Kinder wurden zur Schule gerudert, und Heu wurde über Hänge getragen, die zu steil zum Stehen waren.
Warum sie gingen
Weil die Rechnung nicht mehr aufging, und sie ging in ganz Norwegen zur gleichen Zeit nicht mehr auf.
Ein Klippenbauernhof war tragfähig, solange eine Familie sich davon ernähren konnte und keinen besseren Ort zum Gehen hatte. Er war nicht mehr tragfähig, als es Löhne in den Städten gab, als die Fischerei sich in wenigen Häfen industrialisierte und als die Alternative zum Heutragen von einer Klippe ein Job war, der kein Heutragen von einer Klippe erforderte.
Das zwanzigste Jahrhundert leerte diese Regale stetig, nicht plötzlich. Kinder, die mit dem Boot zur Schule fuhren, nahmen Jobs an, die keines erforderten, und die letzte Generation auf vielen dieser Höfe hatte schlicht keinen Nachfolger.
Wenn man in einem offenen Boot steht und zu einem grünen Regal mit einem Dach hinaufblickt, ist die ehrliche Reaktion nicht Nostalgie. Es ist die Erkenntnis, dass das Gehen offensichtlich die richtige Entscheidung war, und dass jemandes Großmutter dennoch ihr ganzes Leben dort oben verbracht hat.
Die Gebäude überdauern die Menschen in diesem Klima bei weitem. Kalte, trockene Luft und hartes Holz bedeuten, dass ein vor sechzig Jahren verlassenes Haus immer noch aufrecht stehen kann, weshalb der Fjord wie kürzlich geleert wirkt, nicht wie lange verfallen.
