Steilneset, Vardø — the Finnmark witch trials

OVERVIEW

Steilneset is on the edge of Vardø, a fishing town on an island in the Barents Sea, further north and further east than most of Finland. The memorial commemorates the 91 people executed for witchcraft here.

HISTORY

A series of witch trials ran in seventeenth-century Norway, of which the Vardø trials were the most substantial. Over a hundred people were tried in Finnmark and 77 women and 14 men were burned at the stake — the highest rate of accusation of any part of Norway and an unusually high proportion of executions. The trials peaked in a great wave in 1621. Many of the accused were Sámi, and many of the confessions were extracted after the water ordeal.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The memorial is the reason to put this on a map rather than in a footnote. It was designed by the architect Peter Zumthor and the artist Louise Bourgeois, begun in 2006 and opened by Queen Sonja of Norway on 23 June 2011. Zumthor's is a 125-metre suspended fabric corridor with 91 small windows, one for each of the dead, each with a light and a text panel giving that person's name and what the court record says about them. Bourgeois's is a steel chair set permanently alight, surrounded by mirrors: The Damned, The Possessed and The Beloved. It was her last major installation; she died in 2010, before it opened. The entry records an execution ground where the record has been read back out, name by name.

VISITING

Open and free, on the shore at Vardø. Reached by road through the Arctic tunnel or by Hurtigruten. It is a memorial to people who were killed here — visit it as one.