Jorwik Museum

Sunday was not a day of rest. On our programme was a visit to the Viking museum.

Built on the site of the excavation of the Viking Street of Coppergate in Jorvik – the Viking name for York – the Jorvik Viking Centre shows, how the Vikings used to live in their age.

As they peeled back the debris of centuries, complete houses and workshops emerged, still containing everyday utensils, tools and clothing of a civilisation buried for a thousand years.

Now you can step aboard a time car and travel back to the Viking age through a bustling market, dark, smoky houses and a busy wharf, recreated in detail so that you can experience in sight, sound and smell what it was like to live and work in the Viking city of Jorvik. Then follow the most interesting parts of the Museum: the archaeological dig itself, reconstructed where it took place, with the preserved tenth century buildings re-erected where they were found. After this many objects found on the dig are displayed in the Skipper Gallery.

Well, quite frankly, a visit to the museum is not a “must”. The atmosphere has something of a ghost train. The entrance fee is high. You are not allowed to take pictures, so that you have to buy postcards in the obligatory gift shop. In my view, it would have been much wiser for a museum with scientific claim, to show a video of the dig, and merely display the ruins of the walls and the objects, which have been found.

Before we go over to the next museum, a little story from the life of our beloved English teacher Mark. Before he entered his successful career as a teacher, he worked on this very same dig and even found a bucket, which is now being used in the Pattisons’ house. – No, joking apart, the bucket was from the Middle Ages and is in the cellar of the museum.

Die Fotos zur Reise finden Sie in meiner Gallery