The Arctic is often perceived as a future military theatre. But while war rages to the south, it has become a safe haven for refugees from Ukraine and beyond.
To many, Norway is a resolutely northern country. Yet the country whose name means “the north way” in Old Norse is also an eastern country. Norway’s coastline, which looks like a child’s scribblings, stretches all the way around the top of the Scandinavian Peninsula to Russia, where, one could say, east meets east. Teetering on an island off the coastline’s very edge is its easternmost town, Vardø. Famously, it lies east of Istanbul and Saint Petersburg.
“Vardø is the only town in Norway where you’ll see poverty,” my Norwegian colleague in Tromsø forewarned me when I told him of my plan to visit the outpost with my friend, Ria-Maria Adams, an anthropologist with the InfraNorth project at the University of Vienna. Vardø is the oldest urban center in northern Norway, but in the past three decades, it has fallen on hard times.
For centuries, Vardø and the wider Finnmark region surrounding it were largely inhabited by Sámi. The reindeer-herding and fishing people dominated the interior and the coast from the Lyngenfjord in the west to the Kola Peninsula to the east, in present-day Russia. Then, in the early 1300s, Norwegians began settling Finnmark’s coast to procure fish for markets to the south that were burgeoning thanks to the emergence of the Hanseatic League, the medieval merchant network spanning the Baltic and North Seas.
At the same time, the Novgorod Republic was strengthening to the east. The Hanseatic League’s easternmost member, which was also remarkably democratic for its time, escaped the destruction wreaked by the Mongol hordes on other Russian principalities. As it began to pose more of a threat to Norway, King Håkon V Magnusson built a fortress in Vardø in 1308 to protect his realm from attack.
The fortress, still the world’s northernmost, was expanded and turned into an octagonal star fort in the 1730s. The shape had gained popularity in Denmark and elsewhere in continental Europe during the Renaissance in response to the invention of gunpowder and cannons, which could break through the perpendicular masonry walls that characterized earlier fortresses. Two hundred years later, the strategic geometry arrived in the Arctic.
Of fish and furs
Over the next couple of hundred years in Vardø, tension eventually gave way to trade. The city thrived in the twentieth century on the backs of fishing and exchange with Pomor and Russian merchants from around the White Sea. Vardø, in fact, was allegedly one of the first places in Europe where fur coats became fashionable – even before Paris – thanks to the Arctic city’s close links with Siberian trade networks. As late as 1905-1906, a monthly steamship line linked Vardø directly to Russian towns like Teriberka. But the glitz and glamor did not last. In recent decades, ecological and now geopolitical change have thwarted both fishing and cross-border trade.
In the 1970s, the arrival of industrial cod trawling in the Barents Sea spurred overfishing, leading to the collapse of cod and capelin stocks in the 1980s. People moved out but hung onto their houses since they were nearly impossible to sell. As many residents never returned, dozens the abandoned ornate wooden houses originally built by wealthy merchants and fishermen have crumbled into heaps.
“Elektro Corner,” a store where residents could buy televisions in the 1970s that quickly became a common meeting point, has been completely zapped. No modern-day equivalents of TV stores like computer or phone shops have arrived to fill the void – though an electric vehicle charging station has. Hardly any cars used it, however, during our time in Vardø.
From one electric avenue to another
From trawling the seas to scanning the skies
In the wake of fishermen and Russian Pomor traders have come new and unexpected arrivals: Ukrainian refugees, Finnish and German vanlifers, Dutch and Pakistani entrepreneurs, Bulgarian and French birdwatchers, British architects, and Norwegian artists. Then, there are the many anthropologists and geographers seeking to make sense of this new world emerging at the end of the European road network, such as Ria and myself.
As I traveled by bus to Vardø this past May from Kirkenes, where I had boarded after bidding a Ukrainian refugee farewell, towards the end of the journey, I gazed out the window at the Barents Sea. Finally with a moment to myself, I wondered if I would be able to glimpse Russia. For most of the four-hour trip, I had been distracted by my seatmate: an unbelievably boisterous, 72-year-old Norwegian lady whose son worked for Norwegian Air. This position she used to her advantage, flying up and down the country to visit every last fjord.
From Vardø, she was planning to take an e-bike along the coast to Hamningberg, at the end of the European road network, and hopefully see some birds on the way. Vardø is a major stopping point for migrating avians – and tourists who suddenly brake in the middle of the road upon spying a rare species, much to the frustration of locals. (Some even rumor that a handful birdwatchers are actually spooks given Vardø’s strategic location.) The Norwegian lady chatted my ear off for a couple of hours, but at some point, she realized that I was losing steam. With reluctant self-awareness, she chuckled, “I’ll let you go back to staring out the window now.”
The bus drove through a small town called Vadsø on the way to Vardø. I remembered that the Norwegian colleague who had informed me about Vardø’s poverty had mentioned that Vadsø was a place where residents keep their curtains closed. While Vardø has always looked out to the world, Vadsø has kept it at bay. True to form, it did seem like many of the houses had their blinds shut despite it being a brilliantly beautiful day.
As I approached Vardø, I couldn’t see Russia, but I did spy three white radomes atop a hill across the water. These were the mysterious sentinels operated by the Norwegian Armed Forces with the support of the US military. While Norway and the US claim that the GLOBUS III radar site is focused on monitoring space debris, most people are convinced that the site is surveilling Russia. As the story goes – and as would be repeated by many residents to Ria and me throughout our stay – one day in 2000, the protective radome surrounding one of the antennas blew off. The exposed instrument was pointing directly at Russia.
The bus dove through an underwater tunnel to Vardø. Opened in 1982, the pioneering Vardøtunnel represented Norway’s first such submarine passage. The three-kilometer, two-lane corridor links the island of Vardøya with the village of Svartnes on the Varanger Peninsula. Shortly after we emerged, I hopped off the bus and began strolling through the town. Vardø lacked the immaculate appearance of most Norwegian settlements, which are often scrubbed clean to the point of lifelessness. While plenty of Vardø’s houses were still well-kept, others were abandoned. Several of these, however, have been adorned with murals painted by various artists, some internationally renowned. One facade bore a mural of a crying cod fishermen wearing a black-and-white checkered Islender sweater, while another caricatured GLOBUS III. Fish out, antennas in.
For remote communities, aviation is a lifeline
Not long after I arrived at our AirBnB – a sprawling house that was once the old police station – Ria texted to let me know that she had touched down at the airport. She had flown in on a milk run flight originating in Tromsø, stopping in several little towns en route. Only one couple and an elderly man disembarked in Vardø, though. Fortunately for Ria, the elderly Vardø resident offered her a ride into town, as his friend was coming to fetch him. Absent this stroke of luck, since there were no buses and hardly any taxis, Ria would have had to walk into town via the submarine tunnel, which didn’t seem particularly appealing.
On the ride in, the elderly denizen told Ria how Vardø’s population, which in recent years has numbered under 2,000 people, had begun to grow again thanks to the hundreds of Ukrainian refugees who have resettled on the island. For them, this remote, down-and-out fishing town on Russia’s northern periphery was becoming a new and unlikely home.
While Ukrainians are putting down roots, Norwegians are finding it harder to travel to and from Vardø. Across the Arctic, many youth only opt to stay in remote communities if they can easily get out. Tromsø and Reykjavik, two booming Arctic cities, are good examples of this phenomenon. With direct flights to places like London, Paris, and Gran Canaria, the world suddenly seems a skip away.
Wideroe’s milk run flight from Tromsø touches down in Vardø. Photo: Ria-Maria Adams.
Akureyri, Iceland’s second city, is another example. The direct flights introduced by budget airline easyJet to London and Manchester in 2023 have stimulated tourism in the northern whale-watching town while making it more attractive to people aspiring to a life surrounded by ski slopes and hot springs while still enjoying the occasional European citybreak.
In contrast, Vardø is losing many of its logistical connections with the outside world. Ria flew in with Widerøe Air, a small airline bought by Norwegian Air in 2023, which serves remote communities across Norway. Vardø is connected directly by air to the towns of Kirkenes, Vadsø, Berlevåg, and Båtsfjord, from where travelers can transfer to larger cities like Oslo or Tromsø.
Rising ticket prices, however, which many attribute to the airline’s acquisition by Norwegian, have become a point of frustration – especially for those who grew up in Vardø and inherit their parents’ houses. Keeping those properties in the family and occasionally visiting while maintaining a primary residence in the south is becoming an increasingly unaffordable if not altogether impossible arrangement.
The call of the remote
For people looking to carve out new lives entirely, Vardø’s remoteness is precisely its appeal. Its diminishing number of flights is a non-issue for those looking to escape the outside world, whether because of the battlefields of war or love.
In the town’s sole Indian restaurant, we met a refugee from Pakistan who explained how he ended up in this unlikely Arctic corner. “I was sitting in my flat in Oslo during Covid, scanning websites for cheap real estate in Norway,” he offered. Vardø presented the country’s most affordable properties. He bought the building that would become the restaurant for €60,000 and found – or perhaps even created – a market amongst locals and tourists craving chicken tikka masala (a plate of which will set you back 369 NOK, or over US$36). By next year, the entrepreneur plans to turn the upstairs into a small hotel.
Our AirBnB host was another unlikely arrival from a country that sent hundreds of men north in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the whaling grounds of Svalbard: the Netherlands. During the pandemic, when many international borders remained closed, especially in Asia, our Dutch host, who usually wintered in Thailand, instead came to Vardø to visit his friend and go fishing. He liked the place so much that, upon also discovering the real estate to be unbelievably cheap for Norway, he bought the former police station and turned it into a welcoming house that now occasionally accommodates visitors such as Ria and me. The Dutchman manages to make life in Vardø work for him because post-pandemic, he can once again overwinter in Thailand.
A royal feast
Despite spending six months of the year in the land of smiles and papaya salads our host had really leaned into the North Norwegian lifestyle. One day, he came home carrying a red king crab – one that wasn’t good enough to be sold for the hundreds of dollars per kilo the crustacean normally commands. If the prized crab is missing even a single leg or shows any kind of imperfection, it is rejected.
Customers expect nothing less than premium quality of this alien species originally from the North Pacific, which was introduced to the Barents Sea in the 1960s by Soviet scientists looking to engineer a new commercial fishery. They succeeded beyond their wildest economic dreams. But the highly mobile, cannibalistic crab, whose spindly legs can stretch nearly two meters across, has upset the ecology of the Barents Sea. In the dark and watery depths where it scuttles around, the biomass and diversity of benthic creatures has plummeted.
While our host prepared the king crab along with fried fillets from cod he had caught earlier that day, Ria and I helped out in the kitchen by throwing together a potato salad. Then, we headed outside, where a table had been pulled into a streetside spot warmed by the long rays of the sun as it sunk into the ocean.
That day, temperatures had finally climbed into the double digits, leading many of Vardø’s residents to dine al fresco. This far north, there is no grass, so people sit in front of their houses, often quite literally on the road itself. From our asphalt-perched seats facing the Barents Sea, we tucked into the snowy white meat of the crab legs with our host’s friends. One woman hailing from Latvia had moved to Vardø to work in the fish processing plant. Another had come up from southern Norway for fishing. He, too, endured the polar night by fleeing to Thailand.
During our languorous dinner, these relative newcomers regaled us with fishing tales, reflections on the ever-changing weather, memories of traveling to warmer places during the long, dark winters, and even stories about attempts to grow bushes in the unforgiving Arctic climate. Our host, who used to work as a chef in the Netherlands, kept refilling the plate with freshly fried bits of cod. “Seafood is our regular food. It’s free food from the sea,” he noted. “But sometimes I need some meat for balance,” he added.
The friends, who all came from strikingly different backgrounds, emphasized that Vardø is an open community. Like my Norwegian colleague back in Tromsø, they noted that it is much more open and welcoming than Vadsø. “Here, people have always traded and welcomed people from other places,” one of them remarked. “People in Vadsø live behind their curtains.” Later in the evening, a local man and his son drove by, getting out of their car to chat about the newest packaging on their smoked fish products.
As the sun hung over the horizon, our host decided to return the other king crab that he had been keeping alive in the fridge (giving me quite the fright every time I went to grab some milk) to the sea since we wouldn’t be eating it. On what felt like the first day of summer, the creepy crawler was given a second chance at life.
Nighttime in the twilight zone
The next night, Ria and I decided to check out Nordpol Kro, north Norway’s oldest bar. Before we braved the hyperborean den of iniquity, we visited the Steilneset (Witches’) Memorial. The haunting site designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor featuring art by the late French-American artist Louise Bourgeois remembers the victims of the devastating witch hunts that swept through Finnmark in the seventeenth century.
From 1601-1692, Finnmark witnessed what historian Rune Blix Hagen calls “the greatest persecution of Norwegians during peacetime.” Hundreds of supposed witches, women and men, Sámi and Norwegian alike, were burned at the stake for supposed offenses like casting spells or causing diseases. Many of the trials were presided over by Finnmark’s Scottish-born governor, John Cunningham, who had led the Danish missions to revive contact with Greenland in the early 1600s. (Scots were often recruited by the Kingdom of Denmark and Norway for their seafaring skills, and Cunningham in particular was introduced to Christian IV of Denmark by his brother-in-law, James IV of Scotland).
The names of the witch hunt victims and their alleged crimes were printed on cards illuminated by dangling light bulbs inside a long, dark wooden hallway. Sometimes, some folks we met in Vardø told us, they like to come here and drink under each of the signs as they remember the victims. Outside the building, a chair sat empty in front of an eternal flame.
After leaving the memorial, we walked towards the bar through a frisbee golf course built into the side of the grassy Vardøhus Fortress, which long ago stopped serving as a serious defensive structure. In the 21st century, as the radar stations atop the hill indicate, militaries look for warning signs by scanning the electromagnetic spectrum rather than gazing out over earthen ramparts.
The grassy labyrinths of Renaissance military fortifications are now ideal sites for throwing around a disc or ball under the midnight sun, as the three young men had discovered. At one point as Ria and I were walking across, I intercepted their frisbee but failed to return it, hard as I tried to snap my wrist in that flash way. In the Arctic, sports regularly take place next to random military sites, often with few fences in between. Earlier that evening across town, for instance, men were playing soccer under the watchful eyes of the GLOBUS III radomes.
Vardohus Fortress: Ideal for frisbee golf and sunset strolls
Vardø’s recreation hall and football field sit right under the radars.
A few streets away from the fortress, we finally entered Nordpol Kro. The bar was buzzing, contrasting with the solemn witch hunt memorial. Almost as soon as Ria and I sat down, a kind old barfly in a knitted wool hat with translucent blue eyes came over to chat with us as we nursed our bottles of Nordpole Ales. The man couldn’t quite catch our names, thinking both of us were named Pia – a more common name than either Mia or Ria in the Nordics.
Some of the other customers seemed curious about us, too, but not as much as one might think in rural, small-town Norway. People in Vardø are pretty used to seeing the world pass through – including the hundreds of visitors disgorged each afternoon by the Hurtigruten ferry.
Later, a young man who seemed to fancy himself something of a Lithuanian lothiario came to say hello, kissing my hand. Ria and I indulged him for a few moments before deciding that we’d had our fill of small talk in north Norway’s oldest bar. Besides, it would be long walk back to our AirBnB, though we didn’t have to fear the skies getting dark.
As we left, the barfly mumbled that he’d be at the town’s sole café the next morning when it opened around 11:30 am, just in case we wanted to chat some more. We gave a non-committal reply. But true to his word, the next morning as I was out for my morning run, I saw him cycling over to the cafe at exactly the specified time, with the same wool hat snuggling his head. I waved and said hello, happy to have already made my first random acquaintance in Vardø.
Leaving Nordpol Kro, Ria and I exited into the pastel midnight and a cop car cheekily sped by. It seemed there wasn’t much for the police to do that night in Vardø except smile and wave at girls. We strolled down some of the even quieter side streets and inspected the names on the mailboxes. Many of the surnames were Ukrainian.
Earlier in the day, in Vardø’s state-of-the-art municipality building complete with a pool and library, we had interviewed the British-born architect who oversees the town’s infrastructure. He confirmed that the arrival of approximately 200 Ukrainian refugees had helped reverse Vardø’s previous trend of depopulation. He noted that previous December, townspeople had shared a Christmas meal with several of the refugees, representing an effort for folks to come together over festive food.
We had had our own encounter with a Ukrainian refugee at the Pomor Museum, which presents Vardø’s rich history of fishing and trade. There, the sole employee on duty was a Ukrainian woman. Her English and Norwegian were lacking, so I chatted with her in Russian. Ironically, the language of the enemy has become a sort of regional lingua franca, recalling the eighteenth-century emergence of Russenorsk. The pidgin language congealed from conversations between Norwegian and Pomor fisherman likely shouted over barrels of cod and mugs of beer.
While Vardø could offer a safe haven to Ukrainian refugees, it had a much harder time keeping highly paid Norwegian professionals like doctors because of a lack of quality accommodation. While there were dozens of crumbling old houses, not everyone has time to repair those, even if they can be acquired for a song. The modern, minimalist apartments that are taken for granted in places like Oslo and Stavanger are few and far between. So, too, are new houses: since 2018, the British architect explained that only three houses had been built, largely due to the expense of labor and acquiring building materials this far north. While houses may be cheap in Vardø, a new build costs 4 million NOK (close to US$400,00).
Vardø: Of childhood homes and safe havens
The next morning, Ria and I stocked up on groceries in advance of our 30-hour journey by Hurtigruten ferry back to Tromsø, where I was living. On our walk back to our AirBnB, we saw a number of people gathered outside a beautiful house on top of a hill, which seemed to be one of Vardø’s prime streets. Ever the anthropologist, Ria started chatting with one of them, who revealed that they were three siblings preparing to sell the four-bedroom house in which they had grown up. All of them appeared to be in their thirties and had long ago moved to Oslo, 2,000 kilometers to the south.
Without direct flights to Norway’s capital, Vardø had little appeal for millennials seeking to build careers and families in the south. The three siblings admitted, however, that they would hang onto their cabin across the water on the tundra – or whatever remains of it. A few years ago, the unique climatic designation of Vardø and the Varanger Peninsula – once Norway’s only region categorized as an “Arctic” climate zone – became “sub-Arctic” due to climate change.
Vardø is in some way lucky in that its economy has shrunken enough to attract hardscrabble entrepreneurs looking for their next opportunity, be it fetching king crab from the sea or preparing Indian curries for French twitchers. The town where hundreds of people were murdered for witchcraft in the 1600s has also become a refuge for hundreds of people fleeing persecution in the 2000s.
The Arctic is often perceived as a future battleground for conflict, but while war rages to the south, it has become a safe haven for many. For thousands of Ukrainians and other refugees from places like Pakistan, Sudan, and Afghanistan who have been resettled in northern towns, helping to reverse years of outmigration, the Arctic is a place of peace.
Never let your guard down
On our last day in Vardø, I went out for a run around the island’s northern edge. I came upon Drakkar Leviathan, a wooden sculpture resembling a cross between a whale and a Viking longship. At the entrance to the path leading up to the impressive installation, two old bikes had been set down. As I approached the sculpture, I came across the cycles’ owners, who appeared to be an older Ukrainian couple. They were exploring the whale’s wooden innards, too. A Russian artist collective, Taibola Assemble, had erected the piece in 2016.
The artists from Arkhangelsk and Severodvinsk would likely not be able to carry out such a project anymore. They also likely never would have envisioned that one day, Ukrainian refugees would be appreciating their art while Russia waged a war against their homeland thousands of miles away.
While the whale was a product of better times when Norway and Russia got along, across town, the three radomes continued eavesdropping on the skies. Built during the Cold War, they have never let down their guard. In some sense, neither has the Vardøhus fortress. Even if part of it has become a frisbee golf course, in the event of a ground invasion, the star-shaped bastion could still serve its purpose. While fishermen, merchants, and refugees come and go, defenses are forever.
