Culture and Enivronment: The Lighthouse Keeper's Realm.

The Light House Keepper's Realm

By Fradley Garner

" Consider," urges the lighthouse keeper in a Danish guidebook, "that what takes only seconds to ruin must be arranged and laid in place again by our craftsmen, without the help of machines—the walls on Christiansø are handwork."

Some visitors still flout the, rule against climbing the loose stone ramparts, and a tenth of the tiny island's maintenance budget goes to undo the damage.

Such tender care partly explains why the three-century-old islet fortress may have no equal in Northern Europe. Another reason is that Christian's Island (the Danish letter "ø)" is also a word meaning island) is a 710-meter-long, 410-meter-broad pea in the Baltic Sea, connected by a rotating footbridge to even smaller sea-horse-shaped Frederiksø, and 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the well-known Island of Bornholm.

The two peas in a pod belong to the Erteholrn group of 20 islets (erte means pea, holm means islet), and you get to Christiansø by ferry—the M/S Ertholm, of course. Depart from Gudhjem (God's Home), Bornholm, at 10.20 a.m. Arrive at Christiansø 50 minutes later.

life is slow and relaxed on Christiansø.

But why come here at all? Just to stand on Denmark's most easterly bit of real estate and photograph what once was the kingdom's "Devil's Island?" Why King Christian V ordered his Norwegian builders to turn these tiny grains of granite into a fortress against the Swedes in 1684 may be hard to grasp today.

Why then? To goggle at the 125 or so inhabitants going about the daily humdrum of an old fishing community? Herring and tourism is their bread and butter, but so it is for many other Scandinavian fishing villages. True, Christiansø may be the only place in the realm exempt from both civil law and income tax. Alone among Denmark's 395 inhabited islands, the old Baltic outpost lies outside government divisions and is administered by the Ministry of Defense—with the lighthouse keeper acting as what he in fact is: the highest authority on the island.

What if the smoking of herring, which put bigger Bornholm on the map of commerce, started for real in 1825, after the people on Christiansø learned the art from Scottish mercenary soldiers ? Smoke houses with strange stumpy chimneys rose like mini-factory smokestacks, signaling a profitable export for the residents.

Really, Christiansø is for the birds. The whole city-block-size island is one state-protected open-air museum and bird sanctuary. Jonathan Livingston, Seagull would have gladly overflown the place. But land here with the avian masses? Never. A Danish doctor named Tage Voss landed in the early 1950s to practice medicine and went home to write a book, Status paa Skæret (Status on the Rock, Hans Reitzel's Forlag, Copenhagen), which reads like free verse if you can read Danish. To wit:

"The light nights of May are a concerto for flutes, for oboe, drumming, twanging, for English horn, for rattles, the bassoon of geese, the castanets of woodpeckers, marimbas and drums. The air is full of violins, the soft cello of bullfinches, clarinet of thrush, piccolo peeps of swallows, owls' round French horn. And from the rocks the mallards answer with deep strokes of the contrabass.

a typical Christiansø herring smokery.

"And the sea whistles and mumbles and from the green-scummed stone ponds the bullfrog responds melancholically and melodically, while green-speckled toads bray persistently and heartrendingly on."

Some nights the bigger-brained natives join in on accordion and banjo. Since there's only one small hotel on the island and a camping ground for 10 or 15 tents, the tourists tend to clear out by 4 p.m. or so with the last ferry. The local bar comes to life at 5 p.m. Later on, says Danish marine biologist Erik Hoffmann, who likes to tie up his little research vessel here for the night, "We ask the lighthouse keeper if we can borrow the key to Månen." (The Moon, as the island's dance hall is called.) "He's the king and keeper of the keys," adds Hoffmann. "He finds some kids to run up and down the street yelling, 'Big ball at The Moon tonight!"'

Refreshments appear. Musicians materialize. "There's always someone who can play. A fellow named Søren is a master of the accordion. Henning plays one, too. There's always a Swede on banjo, and a flute." And the three or four emissaries of the Danish Institute of Fishery and Marine Research relax from their codfish investigations as the lighthouse keeper beams benignly and everybody has a ball. But you don't have to go to The Moon for that.

The fact is, the Danish state would dearly like to unload Christiansø. Not sell it off the way they did the Virgin Islands to the United States, but get one of the municipalities on Bornholm to take over the whole Baltic peapod. No thanks, the Bornholmers have repeatedly said, and so the defense department continues to keep the islanders under its wing, and they go on paying no municipal taxes. They have no municipal status, those people on the rocks.

They're not allowed to build, either. Only to rebuild ruined buildings. The state did this to them in .1863, when the last soldiers departed, to preserve the island's architecture. If you want to rebuild your house, it must be a true copy of the original house, often hundreds of years old. And when your house is finished, who owns it? The state. Even if all the construction costs were paid by you. On the other hand, you can rent the place out if you can find somebody who wants to live there.

This is another reason why you can still see many of the old miltary buildings on Christiansø and Frederiksø. Some are rented to the inhabitants, who also make their homes in the old stone barracks, in Gamle Kro (Old Inn), Rugmarkshuset (the Baker's house), Smedens hus (the Smith's house), Malerens hus (The Painter's house) and sygehuset (the old "sick house" or hospital). Many of Christian V's soldiers' huts today serve as outhouses or wash houses, though a Few are rented as summer cottages—as are the old powder magazines.

Before 1684, when the king ordered the fortress built, people apparently didn't live year round on the Erteholm islands. Fishermen spent the summer in stone cottages called boiler (booths) which they build themselves and because of which Christiansø used to be called Bodholmen.

Beyond Christiansø's fortress wall can be seen the small tower on Frederiksø.

The lighthouse pokes up from the remains of the "great tower," actually a round tower inside another tower and the nucleus of the fort. On adjacent Frederiksø, the so-called "little tower" looks like the odd round churches on Bornholm. Today it's a museum. The old weapons smithy serves as a church, the main soldiers' barracks as an assembly hall, the chief guard and steward's quarters as the grocer's apartment and public library, the horse stables as a summer house, and the commandant's quarters as the small hotel.

Author Tage Voss, who practiced medicine on the island for several years, recalls that when he first got here he wanted to decorate his old new home and hang his pictures right away. But picture hooks were even scarcer than fresh water on Christiansø. An urgent order went off in the general direction of Bornholm. Months later, when the hooks arrived, Dr. Voss's metabolism had slowed down to a little-island tempo. His pictures looked "really good" on the floor leaning against the walls. "Why must pictures necessarily be hung up?" he wonders aloud in his book.

For that matter, why must people be so hung up? "To be a person on an island is different," says the doctor.

But how can you find this out on a quick trip to these rocks? You might as well go to The Moon.