Denmark · Old Town
Copenhagen
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Copenhagen is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Christiansborg Slot 1,500 points
It takes a whole island, and four names on your street list are only its yards. Go through them instead of around them. Then find the way down: there is something a great deal older under the floor, in the dark, and you can walk into it.
Nationalmuseet 500 points
A whole block of it, between the canal and Ny Vestergade. Whatever time you have set aside for this one, double it, and go in through the courtyard rather than the front. I went in for a quick look and came back out a season later.
Rundetårn 500 points
At the top of Købmagergade, behind a door most people walk straight past. Go in and keep going up. How you get up is the good part, and I am not describing it. From the platform every lane in this level lies out flat in front of you.
Vor Frue Kirke 500 points
It stands on Frue Plads with the university facing it across the square, and the lane down its flank is called Dyrkøb. From out here it seems shut. It is not. Go up between the columns and see how far back the room reaches.
Helligåndskirken 250 points
It stands right on the busiest walking street in the country and hardly anybody turns their head. Go around it into the churchyard at the back. Three steps through the gate and the whole racket is gone. Best quiet on this level.
Københavns Rådhus 250 points
It is open to anyone, and hardly anybody finds that out. Walk in off the square, and once you are through the door go and look at the clock on the ground floor. It keeps the calendar and the movement of the sky at the same time, and it will still be right long after I have stopped caring what day it is.
Kongens Nytorv 250 points
The east end of the level, and the largest square in the city, so most walkers meet it last. Stand at the rim and look at the fronts turned in towards you. Not one of them agrees with its neighbour about how a building ought to finish at the top.
Rådhuspladsen 250 points
The west end of the level, where the long walking street runs out and the ground widens. Roads come in here from every direction. Stop for a minute and see which way people pick. That is a whole town making up its mind, over and over, and I could follow it for a century.
Thorvaldsens Museum 250 points
On the palace island, canal down two sides, and easy to walk past on the way to the bigger thing next door. Go into the courtyard at its centre before you look at anything else. Somebody is buried under it. Not many courtyards can say that.
Name origin
Why it is called Copenhagen.
København means the merchants' harbour. Saxo wrote it down in Latin first, mercatorum portus, and the Danish forms come through as Kiopmanhafn in 1231 and Købmannæhafn in 1253: the merchants', plus harbour. Most towns are named for a river, a saint or whoever got here first. This one is named for the people who came to the water to do business. I have chewed better names. I have never chewed a more honest one.
Sources: trap.lex.dk
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Look at what is under your feet. The trading place was laid out on low, wet shore meadow between what is now Rådhuspladsen and Gammeltorv-Nytorv, and the early medieval waterline ran just south of Løngangstræde on the west side and north of Kompagnistræde and Rådhusstræde on the east. Four names on your street list are standing on the old edge of the water. What made the wet ground worth it was the position: right at the entrance to the Baltic trade, a good natural harbour, and fat farmland behind. Two of those three are about food.
Sources: lex.dk
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Nobody founded Copenhagen. Archaeology puts a trading place here in the 1000s with fishing going on from it, and the whole thing grew out of the great herring fishery in the Sound. The oldest writing that names the place is a letter from Pope Urban III in 1186, confirming that Bishop Absalon had been handed the castle of Hafn, its land, and the town along with it. Absalon had started that castle in 1167. So the town is a good two hundred years older than the first line written about it. A place gets written down when somebody wants it. Before that it just eats herring.
Sources: lex.dk
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1167–1416
The bishops of Roskilde. Absalon began a castle on the holm off the town in 1167, and a letter from Pope Urban III in 1186 confirms that he held the castle of Hafn, its land and the town, and that all of it would go to the see of Roskilde after him. The bishops then put the terms in writing: a town law in 1254 that reads like a contract with the burghers and hands them grazing for their cattle, and another in 1294 setting out precisely what the bishop was owed. The grazing is the only clause in either of them I would have signed.
Sources: lex.dk
- 1416–1660
The kings. Erik of Pomerania took Copenhagen off the bishop of Roskilde in 1416, shortly after coming to the throne, and met no great resistance doing it. From then on the town belonged to whoever wore the crown, and it got used: Christian I set the university up here in 1479, and from 1596 Christian IV spent the good years putting up new buildings and laying out whole new quarters. Somebody's plan is under most of what you walk today.
- 1660–1849
One ruler, and no council. It came to a head with the hereditary homage to Frederik III in 1660, and from then on the institutions of the state sat permanently in the capital, which changed both how the city looked and who lived in it. That arrangement built most of what you will walk past. A town the government never leaves is a town that keeps redoing its own front.
Sources: lex.dk
- 1849–
The townspeople, more or less. The Copenhagen middle class was in the middle of it when democracy came through with the constitution of 1849, and the city then swelled from 120,000 people in 1840 to 400,000 by 1901. Five and a half centuries after a bishop set down what the burghers owed him, the burghers did the setting down. Nobody has asked me anything yet. I have time.
Sources: lex.dk
The emblem
What the shield means.
This one is not the shield. Copenhagen's arms started as a crenellated wall with towers standing over waves, a building with a cross behind them, a six-pointed star and a crescent moon above; the town had a seal by 1254 and impressions survive from 1275. The wall and the building slowly turned into three towers, and the full modern version has collected a great deal else since. Far too much for a thumbnail, which is why even the city uses a simplified one. So the icon draws the other half of the name instead. The harbour. Gabled house fronts standing shoulder to shoulder at the water, the way they stand along Gammel Strand, the oldest natural harbour here, used until the ships got too big for it.
Sources: trap.lex.dk, lex.dk
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
Two names on your street list carry the word vold, which is a rampart: Vester Voldgade and Nørre Voldgade. That is not decoration. The ramparts ran along there, and this level stops where they stopped. By about 1850 their military point had run out and the building ban on the fortress ground fell away; in 1867 the Rigsdag passed the act taking the older land fortification out of service, and in 1870 the municipality took the ground over and started building on it. Two street names are all that is holding the line now.
A fire broke out on 20 October 1728 and burned until the 23rd. It laid most of the medieval inner town in ashes, the whole span from Gammel Strand up to Rosenborg: of 4,087 houses a count made at the time put the loss at 1,670, a modern one at 1,450. What went back up came largely out of a pattern book. In 1729 the royal master builder J.C. Krieger published drawings for plain, serviceable burgher houses, any builder was free to use them, and a lot of those fire houses with their broad dormer bays are still standing. The lanes here are medieval. Most of the fronts along them are not.
Sources: lex.dk
Strøget is not a street. It is five of them in a row, Østergade, Amagertorv, Vimmelskaftet, Nygade and Frederiksberggade, running 1.1 km from Kongens Nytorv to Rådhuspladsen, and the name has never been official. It took over from an older nickname, Ruten, around 1880, and in 1962 the stretch became the first pedestrian street in the country. All five are on your list, so you are going to eat the whole thing whether you planned to or not.
Sources: lex.dk
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- stræde
- A narrow lane, and by a distance the commonest word on this list: Badstuestræde, Læderstræde, Magstræde, Hyskenstræde, Pilestræde, Klosterstræde, Kompagnistræde, Studiestræde. Two people wide, and no apology offered. My preferred portion size.
- gade
- The plain word for a street. Half of them still say who worked there: Skindergade for the skinners, Silkegade for silk, Farvergade for the dyers, Vognmagergade for the cartwrights, Møntergade for the mint. A street that names its trade is a street doing its job.
- torv
- A market square, and most of them are named after what was sold on them: Kultorvet for coal, Æggetorvet for eggs, Amagertorv for what the farmers brought over from Amager. Gammeltorv is the old one and Nytorv the new one, and they run straight into each other. A square that tells you what it fed people has my full attention.
- bro
- A bridge. Højbro, Prinsens Bro and Marmorbroen all put you onto the palace island; Nybrogade and Vindebrogade are named after bridges without being any. Nothing on that island can be reached without crossing water first, which was the entire idea.
- ny
- New. Ny Adelgade, Ny Kongensgade, Ny Vestergade, Ny Østergade, Nygade, Nytorv, Nybrogade, and the big square at the east end is the king's new one. Then look for gammel and you get Gammeltorv, Gammel Mønt and Gammel Strand. Everything here is named against something else, and none of it has been new for centuries.
- vold
- A rampart. Only Vester Voldgade and Nørre Voldgade carry it, and those two happen to be exactly where this level stops. The earth is gone. The word is doing the job now.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 125streets
- 1,588dots
- 25.7km of street
- 32.5km on foot
- 9.3hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.