My first conscious memory occurred on the bottom landing of a staircase that spiraled up four stories in the moated 14th-century Gjorslev Castle in Denmark. I hugged the railing while my tweed-clad grandfather, Eduard Tesdorpf, who owned the place, smiled at me as he walked down the hall to tend to his ever-expanding farm business. I was 3 years old.
And now, five decades later, I’m standing in the same spot, this time with a statuesque Danish woman in stylish Japanese casual wear. “This is roasted and steamed tea from Korea,” Mette Marie Kjaer tells me, offering me a pleasant cup of the wrong-hued brew.
Ms Kjaer runs her Asian tea company, Sing Tehus, from a rented wing of the castle, offering tea ceremonies and yoga sessions while maintaining Gjorslev’s status as the oldest continuously inhabited building in Scandinavia. After half a century of benign neglect after my grandfather’s departure, the castle hosts not only yoga and tea events, but art festivals, medieval fairs and even a summer musical theater in its courtyard. Gjorslev, the home of my grandparents, was opened to the world.
Epic rocks and “chalk kings”
One can say the same thing about Stevns, the area in eastern Denmark where the castle is located. During my childhood, Stevns was considered so secluded that the locals used to say it was where “the crows come to roost”. My children still look askance at me when I explain how many of us in this community of fishermen and farmers were familiar with houses and stoves and coal-burning heaters until the 1970s. Some of my childhood neighbors had never been in Copenhagen, an hour away by car.
Although at night the lights of Copenhagen looked like illuminated pinpricks in the dark Baltic Sea, Stevns seemed an impossibly remote place, where superstitions ran high and conversations short — “Yes, it’s not that,” said too late, was a particularly popular beginning, middle and end to many interactions. Limestone cliffs above the sea sealed off the peninsula, while the Tryggevaelde Stream – a 20-mile waterway carved into the lowlands and, according to local lore, a hideout of elves – turned it into an island.
But now Stevns is being discovered. Copenhagen commuters pour in, drawn by the area’s bucolic charm. The epic rocks of Stevns, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014. a recently opened folklore museum in the main town of Store Heddinge. and renovated inns and restaurants that have turned Stevns into an attractive weekend destination.
Driving from Copenhagen, crossing the Tryggevaelde stream, I noticed the gradual transformation of the landscape as the leaden gray sea slowly receded beneath cliffs and dense beech forests. Industrial-sized fields were reduced to patches of arable land, with Bronze Age mounds standing out like dark citadels.
When the mist rises from the marshes, some say they are real girls—fantasy elves dancing around the mounds. Indeed, Denmark’s national work, “Elverhoj” (“Hill of the Elves”), takes its name from a local mound where, according to legend, the dancing elves and their “chalk king” used to fool around with the Danes kings.
The chalk! It’s everywhere: in the wells (famed by locals as the best coffee-making water in Denmark). to the ancient churches, farmhouses and barns, all built with huge blocks cut out of the rocks. and on my hands and feet after a day of thumping.
For almost a millennium, chalk cutters have mined the rocks for building material, which gives Gjorslev Castle and other buildings the appearance of glittering Lego blocks against the verdant landscape. These ancient, thick, but crumbling walls have been preserved by generations of homeowners who, instead of painting their houses, “replastered” them every few years with a layer of chalk mud applied with a brush.
So I got to know every square inch of Gyorslef, having spent a significant part of my youth recalling its alleys, corners and, on one memorable occasion, hanging from ropes, its 98-foot central tower.
The roots of both my travel writing and climbing pursuits lie here, as Gjorslev’s towers and barns made excellent climbing, while occasional visitors asked me to improvise routes as a guide. Disappointingly, little happened in this grand fortress for six centuries, so I spiced things up with stories of tournaments, executions, and other fake drama to fascinate audiences not yet armed with Internet data-checking devices.
A place in history
During World War II, when the Germans occupied Denmark, Gjorslev He made I entered the history books when my grandfather, my grandfather, spurred on by my cosmopolitan grandmother, whom he had snatched from Copenhagen, turned the place into a center of the Resistance. My grandfather and his crew smuggled hundreds of Jews, scientists and others wanted by the Nazis via fishing boats to neutral Sweden. The forests and closed fields of Gjorslev became secret points for the parachute drop of weapons and other contraband by the British Royal Air Force.
“The biggest problem was the parachutes,” my grandfather once told me. “Every woman lacked silk for stockings and clothes and we were made fun of for silk parachutes. But people would be suspicious if they saw someone in new silks, so we had to burn him.”
His luck ran out in the final weeks of the war when someone blew his cover and a caravan of German soldiers came rolling into the trench to arrest him. He jumped off the back of the castle and spent the end of the occupation pretending to be a patient in a Copenhagen hospital room provided by the Resistance.
After liberation, the farmer became a war hero, joined the Danish parliament and various company boards, and was visited at the castle by dignitaries such as Field Marshal Montgomery and Eleanor Roosevelt.
On a recent visit, I ate at one of my grandfather’s favorite places, Traktorstedet Gjorslev Bogeskov, a century-old food kiosk overlooking the rolling Baltic by the castle forest. The restaurant has been completely modernized and hosts an excellent buffet of local seafood, Danish pork and salads (lunch, 259 kroner or about $38). “I’ve only been here 20 years, so I’m not a Stevns person yet,” booth hostess Pia Johansen told me with a funny-yet-not-funny smile.
A 10-minute walk through the forest on a path bordering the sea brought me to a worn recess in the cliff where a wooden staircase once descended to the sea. This was the spot my grandfather chose to smuggle Jews and other refugees 20 miles across the Oresund strait to Sweden. On the other side of the path is the log cabin where they huddled at night, awaiting their journey to freedom.
The sea was clear here and I took a dip in the cold water, imagining my grandfather in his tweeds and his mates loading the families onto the waiting fishing boats.
The “famous fish clay”
Eleven miles south, the Stevns Klint Experience (admission, 140 kroner) recently opened over a former limestone quarry by the sea. The center consists of a dramatic strip of concrete and glass galleries, a cinema and a cafe half-buried in the hillside above the quarry.
“Here’s the famous fish clay,” said Nana Katrine Legh-Smith, who is the center’s community outreach coordinator, pointing to a two-inch dark layer running through a bus-sized piece of cliff, the centerpiece of the museum. The name comes from the high concentration of fossilized fish teeth and scales in the layers. Mrs Legh-Smith, like me, grew up here and we remembered playing around the cliffs, unaware of the importance of fish slime to science and how it would turn Stevns into a world attraction.
“Walter Alvarez turned our rocks into stars,” she said, referring to the American geologist who visited in 1978 and made a remarkable discovery: Fish clay, rooted in iridium — a rare space-related metal — provides some proof that the extinction of the dinosaurs, along with half of Earth’s species, was caused by an asteroid impact. Stevns is one of the few places on the planet where this layer can be seen, earning the rocks UNESCO status.
Another two miles up the coast is the 13th-century Hojerup Church, which looks set to drift into the sea 100 feet below. For eight centuries the church and its eroding rock sported the tag of “a rooster prance every Christmas,” according to local lore, until March 16, 1928, when a large part of the church’s cemetery and nave collapsed into the Baltic. When I was a kid, I could wander undisturbed in the open back and stare at the Hitchcockian blob. Now the place is buzzing with tourists. Any trepidation associated with standing there can be calmed by the knowledge that the rock below has been fortified with concrete.
I walked down the steep steps to the chalky beach where some Japanese visitors were photographing the jagged rocks. After climbing back up and across the parking lot, I was rewarded with an excellent meal of herring, meatballs and other local delicacies at the cozy Hojeruplund (lunch for two, 520 kroner).
But for me the best meal here is four miles down the coast at Rodvig, nicknamed “the Stevns Riviera” for its sandy beach, now popular with windsurfers. The 18th century Rodvig Kro & Badehotel was, in my youth, a “special occasion” spot for anniversaries and weddings, often with boiled cod smothered in butter and remoulade — no luxury then for the hearty locals!
But in the past five years, the place has been revitalized by chef Morten Vennike, a veteran of Copenhagen’s bustling restaurants who makes good use of local produce. I went for coq au vin, garnished with wild mushrooms and finished with caramel and apple sorbet (dinner for two with wine, 795 kroner). I left with a new appreciation, after all these years, of the authentic Danish decor of the mid-century inn.
Later, at the port, I bumped into one of Gjorslev’s former farmers, whom I had known as a child. “What do you think makes Stevns so special?” I asked him, amid the clatter of sails against sails.
He thought for a moment. “I couldn’t say that.” Look across the bay to the cliffs, which at dusk looked like cubist engravings framed by the now blue-green Baltic. These same waters nurtured the undistinguished talents of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann on nearby shores, but the unique magic and legends of Stevns remain guarded by a tribe of taciturn people.
There was a long pause as I waited for the old gentleman to add something. He did not do it. “Yes,” I finally answered. “It’s not that.”
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