Bergen

The EU Contest city of 2001 is Bergen, Norway. This city has been host to international gatherings throughout its almost one millennium long history.

Bergen was the capital of Norway in the middle ages and the largest city in Scandinavia in the same period. Now Bergen is a modern city with 230,000 inhabitants. Bergen is a major a international centre for marine research and houses the largest academic institutions in Western Norway: The University of Bergen, the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Christian Michelsen Institute for Science and Intellectual Freedom, Norsk Hydro Centre for Petroleum Research and the Institute of Marine Research.

King Olav Kyrre is officially recognised as the founder of Bergen in 1070 AD. With an excellent harbour Bergen provided an ideal place for continental traders to meet fishermen from the northern parts of Norway to trade.

The German Hanseatic League made Bergen one of the four cities where they set up main trading office together with Bruges, London and Novgorod. German and Dutch traders made a strong impression on the city of Bergen from the late middle ages to the late 16th century. It is still possible to see German and Dutch influences through street names and surnames of several of the "old Bergen families".

The trade and industry of present Bergen is still strong in the fields of fish trading and shipping, but North Sea petroleum activities has increasingly become part of Bergen's areas of excellence.

The 19st century meant a great cultural upswing for Bergen:

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), widely regarded as the father of modern prose drama, worked as "stage poet" at Den Nationale Scene (the national theatre in Bergen) for six years in the early 1850s. At this early point in his career Ibsen benefited from being sent by the theatre on a study trip to Denmark and Germany (later he was to spend a large part of his life on the continent). While in Bergen he wrote, among other things the Norwegian historical drama "Lady Inger of Østraat" (1855).

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), one of the most important composers in the 19th century. His music is a beautiful mixture between old Norwegian folk tunes and orchestrative craftmanship. Among his most famous works are the A-minor Concerto, Ballade in G minor and Peer Gynt. Most young pianists have also played some of his 100 lyric pieces. Grieg lived most of his life in Bergen, in his home at Troldhaugen.

Ole Bull (1810-1880) was, together with Lizt and Paganini, the biggest "pop-star" in 19th century Europe. His skills on the violin was such that women fainted and men lost money. He toured all over the world and was a great ambassador for the Norwegian folk music. He build a palace outside Bergen with room for all the souvernirs he had gathered around in the world. In his last years he lost almost all of his enormous fortune in an attempt to build a perfect city, Oleania, in the USA.

Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) is one of the greatest multi-talents Norway has fostered. After finishing zoology studies in Christiania (Oslo) he set off on an expedition with the sealer Viking in 1882 studying animal life, ice movements, ocean currents and winds. Nansen got back to Norway and was given a curator position at Bergen Museum (the precursor to the University of Bergen) - still a very young man! Nansen spent six years in Bergen and finished an outstanding first Norwegian doctoral thesis in neurology "The Structure and Combination of Histological Elements of the Central Nervous System" (1887). After leaving Bergen Nansen went back to the Arctic: the first person to cross Greenland on skis (1888), expedition investigating ocean currents carrying the ship Fram from east to west in the arctic ocean, closest to the North Pole on skis (1895), first Norwegian ambassador to Great Britain (1906), major contributions to the establishment of oceanography as a science, first League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (1921), helped save 30 million starving people in the USSR and given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

Gerhard Armauer Hansen (1841-1912) is the man who discovered Mycobacterium leprae - the cause of leprosy. Before Armauer Hansen's work it was disputed whether leprosy was contagious or hereditary. Armauer Hansen worked on his leprosy research as a doctor at St. Jørgen's Hospital in Bergen. With its three large leprosy institutions Bergen became an international centre in the leprosy research in the 1850s. Armauer Hansen's breakthrough came in 1873 with the discovery of Mycobacterium leprae. He continued his work infecting nurses and patients with the bacteria in order to test whether M. leprae really was the cause of leprosy and instigated new laws on the care of leprosy victims. Despite the unethical nature of his research Gerhard Armauer Hansen won international recognition and leprosy is now also known under the name Hansen's disease.

Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862-1951) is the man who is credited with founding the "Bergen School" in modern meteorology. This work developed scientific principles for meteorology: More extensive weather observations provided new knowledge about the atmospheric processes that lead to a certain weather condition. The main paper by Bjerknes is "On the Dynamics of the Circular Vortex with Applications to the Atmosphere and to Atmospheric Vortex and Wave Motion" His work was particularly important in order to understand the thermal processes that cause movements of air and oceans.

Stein Rokkan (1921-1979) was important in the development of comparative social sciences. Rokkan did ground breaking work in the implementation of new theories and methods, the construction of databases and development of practical research cooperation that made multi-national analyses of political structures possible. He founded Norwegian Social Science Data Services, was responsible for establishing the Department of Sociology and to a large extent the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bergen.

Today the University of Bergen is one of the most internationally oriented educational and research establishments in Norway. UoB and other academic institutions in Bergen attract a high number of international visitors due to various scientific areas of expertise recognised throughout the world. Bergen has also established itself as a major city in modern culture with annual Bergen International Festivals since 1953 and being a European City of Culture in the year 2000.