"ARHUS - MOUSE COLLECTION" a Århus Travel Page by JohnnySpangles

Arhus, or Aarhus, is a city in Eastern Jutland and is home to an open air museum called Den Gamle By. This is a town within a city and is the result of the work of a man called Peter Holm and his passion for collecting houses. Strangely enough it all came about by accident as Peter originally wanted to collect mice. Drinking is the national sport of Denmark and most Danes collect booze related ephemera like bottle tops or beer mats. As the only beers available in Denmark are Carlsberg and Tuborg, which are both exactly the same and both brewed by those clever marketing people at Carlsberg, their collections usually only run to two items. As Peter was more anally retentive than most he wanted to collect something that he could at least get into double figures. Therefore he hit upon the idea of creating a mouse town. This, he reasoned, would be both a source of entertainment for himself and a source of revenue by showing it off to others at travelling fairs. Thus one day in 1908 he sent one of his lickspittles out to procure his first mouse. The lackey, being devoid of ears and slack of nose, misheard his master’s instructions and returned three weeks later with ten wagonloads of bricks and timbers.

The rest, as they say, is history, probably. Peter abandoned the idea of a ‘mouse’ town and decided to start building a ‘house’ town instead. By then gerbils had become popular anyway, and the days of the travelling mouse towns were becoming numbered. Inspired by his new vision he scoured the length and breadth of Denmark, which took all of two days, and amassed a collection of over fifty houses. He moved them brick by brick and reassembled them all in Arhus. The speed at which his collection grew was awesome and the peasants that sold their hovels to Peter had barely scratched their ‘X’ on the deed of sales before the bricks started coming down around their ears. Indeed some of the peasants found themselves being transported with the bricks as fixtures and fittings, as specified in the contract.

By the time the Second World War had broken out he had collected fifty houses, which the Nazis promptly strolled in and nicked. Fortunately the evil threat of Teutonic menace was vanquished by the brave bulldog spirit of the British forces and the old town of Den Gamle By returned once more to Danish hands.

So it is now an open air museum for all to enjoy, even the Germans are allowed back in. In fact it’s mostly the Germans, as they keep the entire economy of Jutland in the black.

The pig has an interesting tale to tell, and a curly one at that. I don’t know whether it is still there, and I didn’t know what it was when I took the picture, but apparently it was part of an artistic statement against racism. Back in 1994 bronze sculptures of a pig in a trenchcoat, weighting over one tonne each, appeared overnight in various cities in eleven different European countries. Most city fathers got the hump at these things popping up in their city squares and had them removed, but some saw the point and either moved them to galleries or left them where they were to let the natural erosive qualities of vandalism and graffiti take their course.