Christiania - It Takes All Sorts
Carlow Nationalist August 2010
At first I thought it was a large bar of milk-chocolate the man produced from his pocket and placed on the table. Just a minute, I thought, something's not quite right here as he pulled a leatherman multi-tool from his pocket and snipped a corner from the 'chocolate'. He then removed a mobile phone from another pocket and placed it beside the 'chocolate' on the table – except it wasn't a mobile phone. Taking the cover from the instrument he proceeded to digitally weigh the square he'd just snipped from the block. Enlightenment slowly dawned on me as a well-dressed man who had joined him handed over a sheaf of crisp Danish Kroner and left the bar with the dark brown lump of sweet candy he'd just purchased.
When I walked into the Woodstock Bar in Copenhagen's self-proclaimed autonomous neighbourhood of Christiania I was smiling from the sheer delight of being able to order a beer and sit at a table quietly smoking a cigarette while listening to classic hits from the seventies hissing through the speaker system. However, my smile was a mere grimace compared to those on the faces of the others in the room. Four long haired men – in their sixties I guessed – wearing black, leather waistcoats sat at the end of the bar, each sporting facial expressions that sat somewhere on the international smile-scale between having won the lottery and Buddhistic enlightenment.
Over a backgammon board a man and woman found the rolling of the dice the funniest thing that had happened to them since the early seventies. An older woman, wearing the type of floral-patterned dress so favoured by grannies the world over, looked over their shoulder while licking and cajoling a couple of cigarette papers into a long and impressive white funnel. She too was smiling the smile of the mentally deranged.
At another table nearest to the door a blonde man wearing a backward facing baseball cap rubbed the stubble on his face and began to laugh at his outstretched fingers. He was explaining something rather important to his fingers. Every so often he drew them closer to his face as if to emphasise a point to his wiggling, earless friends. A heavy-set young woman with matted white dreadlocks and wearing pink, military-patterned fatigues walked into the room, she inspected the ceiling carefully and then the floor looking like she had no idea why she'd just walked in, that was until she heard the music wafting across the smoke filled room. "Oh yes, now I remember, I came in to dance", she dropped her small backpack to the floor where she stood, followed by her jacket and scarf and began flapping her arms and hopping on one foot like an obese flamingo attempting to take flight. Nobody in the small wooden Christiania bar paid her the slightest bit of attention.
The enclave (if that's the right word) of Christiania in the Copenhagen borough of Christianshavn is Denmark's answer to the Indian Ashrams or communes of the nineteen-sixties. Originally built as a military barracks it was taken over in 1971 by a group who's aim it was – in the words of the group's spokesman Jacob Ludvigsen – "to build a society from scratch... where all the seekers of peace could have their grand mediation..." Ludvigsen went on to declare the place to be a refuge for "stoners who are too paranoid and weak to participate in the race..."
With this mantra Christiania quickly
found itself as the refuge of the burgeoning hippie movement, squatters, collectivists
and anarchists all of whom were a long way removed from the site's previous
military occupants. The inhabitants of the community developed their own set of
rules independent from those of the Danish government. However, despite
Denmark's progressive and liberated attitude the 'squatters' have been at
constant loggerheads with the government whose aim has been to close down this
small, smoke-filled blot on the clean page of Copenhagen.
Over the years there have been running battles and protests between the residents and the police enforcing the government's will. In 2007 the Danish government's Forest and Nature Agency – backed by riot police – moved in to demolish a small abandoned building. The local residents, fearful the police intended to demolish other buildings, set up road blocks and barricades and pelted their 'invaders' with stones and Molotov cocktails until the police were forced to retreat.
The use and open sale (on the aptly named
Back in the Woodstock bar I finished my drink and left. At the doorway a young man with white teeth and a pet rat perched on his shoulder stopped me, "the world's a beautiful place man," he said. I nodded and stroked the rat's shining fur. The man smiled, "you like my rat? his name is Hendrix man, like Jimmy. Welcome to Christiania." I was still smiling as I left their Utopian world beneath a sign which bore the words 'You are now entering the EU'.
