Archipelago

We're back after almost three years with a brand-new season about people living a life less ordinary — beginning with Danish adventurer Thor Pedersen, who shares his incredible story of visiting every country in the world without flying. Thor recounts his experiences crossing oceans on cargo ships, navigating through war zones, and enduring the mental and physical challenges that came with this ambitious endeavor. Despite numerous setbacks, including a two-year pandemic lockdown in Hong Kong,...

“Opening Champagne with a sword is more fun. You can feel it in your stomach.” So says Marianne Sass Petersen — a bookkeeper from Amager whose life changed when she attended a Champagne sabering competition at Tivoli. Dedicating herself to the art of opening Champagne bottles with swords, she went on to win the Danish championship — and launch a successful business teaching sabering. In the final episode of the season, we visit Marianne's house in Amager to find out why she loves sabering,...

In episode five, we meet the chef trying to put Amager on the culinary map — quite literally. Yngve Fobian is the head chef at Øens Spisested — a "local" restaurant in more ways than one. For one thing, most of its ingredients are from Amager — a haul celebrated on a map in the dining room. Fish come from the icy waters of the Øresund, vegetables from fields near Dragør, game from the island's forests, and fruits and flowers from its commons. Yngve also gives free meals to locals who shar...

The Helgoland sea-bathing club, at the northern tip of Amager's beach, is home to one of the world's oldest winter-bathing associations, Det Kolde Gys ("The Cold Shock"). In episode four of This Amarkaner Life, we brave the heat of the sauna and the icy waters of the Øresund to talk to some of the association's hardiest members. We meet a woman who's been winter bathing for 30 years and a local physio who swims in the sea every morning and is one of the club's saunagus "masters". They reve...

There's already a bit of a buzz around this episode — if only because the Amarkaners in question are the island’s hard-working honeybees. In episode three, we visit Bybi — a bee-powered project based in Amager’s historic Sundholm district — to meet its British founder, Oliver Maxwell. We learn about Bybi's unusual origin story and location, discover why Oliver prefers to see honey as an "invitation" not a product, and hear about the honey that has some of Copenhagen's best chefs "falling ove...

Please return your seatbacks and tray tables to their fully upright position because we'll shortly be landing at one of Amager’s best-known restaurants — Flyvergrillen. You'll find it at Copenhagen airport, but don’t go looking for it before your next flight. Because Flyvergrillen isn’t so much at the airport as right alongside it. Indeed, the only thing separating it from the runway is a barbed-wire fence and about 100 metres of tarmac — giving diners a prime view of planes taking off or lan...

"Amager is a great place. Amager is number one.” So says Kurt Helmann Jensen ("Kurt like Kurt Russell"). And he should know. For one thing, he's a self-proclaimed "Amarkaner" — a dyed-in-the-wool resident of Amager, the much-maligned, teardrop-shaped island in southern Copenhagen. He's also the chairman of the association that runs Dyrenes Mindegrave, a cemetery on the island where bereaved pet owners — including Kurt — have come to lay their furry friends to rest for the past 75 years. A...

Danish "song kindergartens" hit the right notes, while a 19th-century prison provides an unsettling location for an overnight stay. In this episode, we visit Trekroner Børnehus, a kindergarten outside Roskilde, to hear about Sangglad — a scheme to "increase and improve" singing in Danish pre-schools. Then we head to Horsens Prison Museum, in Jutland, to discover how a notorious jail has been transformed into a popular tourist attraction. Further reading: Sangglad Horsens Prison Museum Th...

Two Danish institutions have discovered eye-catching ways to go green. From Greta Thunberg’s school strike to the Fridays for the Future movement, there’s no shortage of children taking a stand against climate change. But while their activism takes place outside the school gates, some say that what kids are taught while they’re at school is just as important — if not more so. In this episode, we visit the Green Free School, in Amager, and talk to co-founder Phie Ambo about how the school i...

In the bleak midwinter, the sun scarcely seems to rise in Denmark at all. Is it any wonder, then, that the Danes are so obsessed with good lighting? That Denmark has produced many of the world’s most iconic lights? That Danes have the world’s highest consumption of candles? Or that light is fundamental to the country’s best known cultural phenomenon, hygge? In (hopefully) the most illuminating episode of Archipelago yet, we discuss the light fantastic with three Danish design devotees: artist...

“Those who wish to relive their lives, never lived them in the first place.” The words of Karen Blixen — the acclaimed Danish writer whose life story is the basis of a brand-new ballet created exclusively for the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen. Blixen sketches the writer's life story from her childhood years in Denmark through her unhappy marriage to her half-cousin Bror Blixen, her years running a coffee plantation in Kenya—where she embarked on a doomed love affair with Denys Finch Ha...

Meik Wiking is one of the world’s leading happiness experts. The founder of the Happiness Research Institute, he’s also the author of two New York Times bestsellers — The Little Book of Hygge and The Little Book of Lykke — which have been translated into more than 35 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide. Little wonder, then, that he's been dubbed “probably the world’s happiest man”. But when Meik turned 40, he realised that, statistically speaking, as a Danish man, he’d lived...

We kick off season two of Archipelago with a very special guest indeed. Naja Marie Aidt has been described as “one of the most intelligent writers of the contemporary literary world” and as “one of the compassionate voices in fiction”. Born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen, she’s the author of ten poetry collections and three short-story collections — including Baboon, which won the Nordic countries’ most prestigious literary award, the Nordic Council's Literature Prize, as well as the D...

We end season one with a bang — on the little known Danish island of Pornø. To mark half a century since Denmark became the first country to legalise visual pornography, we take a deep dive into arty porn and pornographic art. Up first, we meet Rasmus Steenbakken, the curator of a major new group exhibition at the ARoS art museum in Aarhus which looks at cultural creativity, freedom of expression and art in the age of pornography. Then we talk to Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup of Copenhagen...

Once a foodie wasteland, Copenhagen is today a major gastronomic destination. It is, of course, the epicentre of New Nordic cuisine — the culinary movement that championed hyper-local, seasonal ingredients and elevated foraging and fermentation to art forms. But it’s also a global food city — one where savvy diners can find everything from Surinamese peanut soup to Ethiopian injera, Vietnamese banh mi to Cantonese dim sum. Even the local government has gone gourmet. There are honey bees on...