A time travel in the capital

Today I met again with Jóhann J. Ólafsson and Baldur Hafstað. I admired Jóhann's personal collection of books related to Konrad Maurer, some of which are very rare. Another very special treasure of his is an original copy of the same map of Iceland from 1844 (made in Denmark) that Konrad possibly or probably used on his travel. The map was not just a folded sheet of paper as we know maps today: it was made as a grid of map sections, each individually mounted on good cardboard, connected with a canvas backing to be folded. I found that quite amazing.

Jóhann took me out of town to a valley located west of Reykjavík (on the old way to Þingvellir) where Konrad and his team had tested the horses before beginning the actual tour. Today this area is still largely unchanged, you might think at first, but actually this is wrong because in the 19th century there would have been no trees at all, no blue flowering lupines, just moor and rocks. Iceland has become a lot greener in the past century, and especially in the past decades.

Then we had lunch (Smørrebrød in a Danish restaurant) and visited the old schoolhouse, which was also the seat of the Icelandic parliament (see top photo) before the new parliament building was completed.

In the school, students dressed very handsomely in historic clothes showed us around an exhibition about Reykjavík in the 19th century, about Jón Sigurðsson and about the early parliament.

Jóhann pointed out to me where Dillon's House (the house in which Konrad lodged for 8 weeks while he was in Reykjavík) originally stood. (Today the house, as we had seen, has been moved to the Árbæjarsafn museum. On the original location, a street corner in the heart of modern Reykjavík, is now a small parking lot.) The town map here shows Reykjavík in 1876. So to imagine the town in 1858, you must subtract some of these buildings and streets.

This painting here is Reykjavík in 1847, and happens to be exactly the view from Dillon's House towards Dómkirkjan. The two-storey building behind it is the school. This is the view that Konrad would recognize at once -- whereas if he had come in a time machine to Reykjavík of 2011, I think he would find it very strange to see the remaining fragments of the old days (such as the church and the school, the lake and the view of the distant mountains) surrounded by all these modern big buildings, asphalt streets, and cars.