Museums in Denmark
National Museum of Denmark
The National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet) is Denmark’s largest museum of cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures, alike. The museum's main domicile is located a short distance from Strøget. It contains exhibits from around the world, from Greenland to South America. The museum has a number of national commitments, particularly within the following key areas: archaeology, ethnolo ...Viking Museum
The Viking Museum is built upon the site of anarchaeological excavation that revealed various Viking Age structures, items, and parts of a human skeleton. The museum also provides information regarding the history of Viking Age Aarhus and also features copies of items on display at the Moesgaard Museum, itself located near Aarhus.Aarhus Old Town
The Old Town in Aarhus, Denmark (Den Gamle By), is an open-air town museum consisting of 75 historical buildings collected from 20 townships in all parts of the country. In 1914 the museum opened as the world's first open-air museum of its kind, concentrating on town culture rather than village culture, and to this day it remains one of just a few top rated Danish museums outside Copenhagen. The museum buildings are orga ...National Gallery of Denmark
Statens Museum for Kunst ('Statens Museum' or sometimes 'National Gallery of Denmark') collects, registers, maintains, researches in and handles Danish and foreign art dating from the 14th century till the present day, mostly with their origins in western culture circles. The museum"s collections constitute almost 9,000 paintings and sculptures, approximately 300,000 works of art on paper as well ...Viking Ship Museum
The Viking Ship Museum (Vikingeskibsmuseet) is the Danish national museum for ships, seafaring and boatbuilding in the prehistoric and medieval period. Around the year 1070, five Viking ships were deliberately sunk at Skuldelev in Roskilde Fjord in order to block the most important fairway and to protect Roskilde from enemy attack from the sea. These ships, later known as the Skuldelev ships, were excavated in 1962. They ...Museum of Copenhagen
The Museum of Copenhagen (Københavns Bymuseum) is the official museum of Copenhagen city. It documents the history from the 12th century to the present day. The museum is located close to the Central Station at Vesterbrogade, in a mansion from 1787 which used to house the Royal Copenhagen Shooting Society, and overlooks Skydebanehaven, the former shooting range now serving as a small public park. Outside the museu ...Frilandsmuseet
Frilandsmuseet (The Open Air Museum), opened in 1897 and covering 40 hectares, it is one of the largest and oldest open-air museums in the world. It is a department under the Danish National Museum. The museum features more than 100 buildings from rural environments and dating from 1650-1950. All buildings are original and have been moved piece by piece from their original location save a windmill that is still found in i ...Moesgård Museum
Moesgård Museum is situated at Moesgård manor near Aarhus. It is both a regional museum and a dedicated museum for archaeology and ethnography. The main part of the museum’s collection of archaeological artefacts is Danish, even though the museum possesses a rather large amount of archaeological material – known as The Ethnographical Collections – from Bahrain and other countries surrounding ...Skovgaard Museum
The Skovgaard Museum is situated in the former town hall from 1728 next to Viborg Cathedral. It holds a collection of works by four generations of the Skovgaard family of artists. The main feature of the permanent collection is the work of the Skovgaard family. Peter Christian Skovgaard (1817–1875) was the principal representative of national romanticlandscapes of the Golden Age of Danish painting. His sons, Joakim Sko ...Ribe Viking Museum
Ribe Viking Museum exhibits the history of Ribe from the Viking Age through the Middle Ages down to the year 1700. The museum presents thousands of findings and reconstructed environments from 1300 years old Ribe town in the Viking Age and the Middle Ages.Bornholm Art Museum
The Bornholm Art Museum was constructed in 1993 and enlarged in 2003. The museum's permanent collection consists principally of paintings by artists with connections to Bornholm from the early 19th century to the present day. Special attention is given to the Bornholm school of painters which emerged at the beginning of the last century when a number of modernists, attracted to picturesque Bornholm and the tiny island of ...Bornholm Museum
The Bornholm Museum is a museum located in Rønne. The museum gives a history of Rønne and the island of Bornholm, dating from the Paleolithic era to the modern age, including the history of occupied Bornholm during World War II. The museum houses a number of Nordic Bronze Age and Iron Age artifacts relating to the island and uses a Mjolnir, discovered in Bornholm, but now housed in the National Museum of Den ...Ladby Ship
Ladby Ship is Denmark's only ship grave from the Viking period. Around 925 AD, the king of Ladby was buried in his ship, which was 21.5 meters long and 3 meters wide. A burial mound was raised above the ship. His grave was furnished with all his fine possessions, including 11 horses and 3 or 4 dogs. In the bow of the ship lies the original anchor and anchor chain. Unfortunately, the grave was plundered back in the Viking ...Featured Historic Landmarks, Sites & Buildings
Historic Site of the week
Cochem Castle
The original Cochem Castle, perched prominently on a hill above the Moselle River, served to collect tolls from passing ships. Modern research dates its origins to around 1100. Before its destruction by the French in 1689, the castle had a long and fascinating history. It changed hands numerous times and, like most castles, also changed its form over the centuries.
In 1151 King Konrad III ended a dispute over who should inherit Cochem Castle by laying siege to it and taking possession of it himself. That same year it became an official Imperial Castle (Reichsburg) subject to imperial authority. In 1282 it was Habsburg King Rudolf’s turn, when he conquered the Reichsburg Cochem and took it over. But just 12 years later, in 1294, the newest owner, King Adolf of Nassau pawned the castle, the town of Cochem and the surrounding region in order to finance his coronation. Adolf’s successor, Albrecht I, was unable to redeem the pledge and was forced to grant the castle to the archbishop in nearby Trier and the Electorate of Trier, which then administered the Reichsburg continuously, except for a brief interruption when Trier’s Archbishop Balduin of Luxembourg had to pawn the castle to a countess. But he got it back a year later.
The Electorate of Trier and its nobility became wealthy and powerful in large part due to the income from Cochem Castle and the rights to shipping tolls on the Moselle. Not until 1419 did the castle and its tolls come under the administration of civil bailiffs (Amtsmänner). While under the control of the bishops and electors in Trier from the 14th to the 16th century, the castle was expanded several times.
In 1688 the French invaded the Rhine and Moselle regions of the Palatinate, which included Cochem and its castle. French troops conquered the Reichsburg and then laid waste not only to the castle but also to Cochem and most of the other surrounding towns in a scorched-earth campaign. Between that time and the Congress of Vienna, the Palatinate and Cochem went back and forth between France and Prussia. In 1815 the western Palatinate and Cochem finally became part of Prussia once and for all.
Louis Jacques Ravené (1823-1879) did not live to see the completion of his renovated castle, but it was completed by his son Louis Auguste Ravené (1866-1944). Louis Auguste was only two years old when construction work at the old ruins above Cochem began in 1868, but most of the new castle took shape from 1874 to 1877, based on designs by Berlin architects. After the death of his father in 1879, Louis Auguste supervised the final stages of construction, mostly involving work on the castle’s interior. The castle was finally completed in 1890. Louis Auguste, like his father, a lover of art, filled the castle with an extensive art collection, most of which was lost during the Second World War.
In 1942, during the Nazi years, Ravené was forced to sell the family castle to the Prussian Ministry of Justice, which turned it into a law school run by the Nazi government. Following the end of the war, the castle became the property of the new state of Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate). In 1978 the city of Cochem bought the castle for 664,000 marks.