Vardø: Norway's easternmost town

Closer to Saint Petersburg than to Oslo by longitude, Vardø was the site of some of the most severe witchcraft trials in Scandinavian history.

The center, Norway's most easterly, is comfortably explored on foot despite the arctic climate.

The Vardøhus Fortress, the oldest still in function in Norway, dominates the Arctic harbor from a strategic position on the Barents Sea.

A short walk away, the Memorial to the Witches, an art installation dedicated to the ninety-one people executed for witchcraft in the seventeenth century, recounts one of the darkest chapters of local history.

Continuing on, you observe the colorful houses of the harbor, built to resist the Arctic winds that blow constantly on this extreme tip of continental Norway.

Toward evening, birdwatching enthusiasts reach the nearby cliffs to observe colonies of Arctic seabirds, including puffins.

The witch trials of Vardø, among the most violent in northern Europe, led to the execution of ninety-one people, mostly women, over a period of little more than a century from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Vardø is located at a more easterly longitude than St. Petersburg, Istanbul, and even Cairo, despite being geographically part of Western Scandinavian Norway.