Qualla: Den Gamle By

Den Gamle By: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gardar Rurak, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1908 the old mayor's house of Aarhus stood empty and unwanted, and the decision had been taken to demolish it and put up something new. A local teacher and translator named Peter Holm intervened — not to save the building in place, which was impossible, but to have it taken apart carefully instead of destroyed. The dismantled house reappeared a year later as the centrepiece of the historical section at the Danish National Exhibition of 1909 in Aarhus. Five years after that it was rebuilt again, in the botanical gardens, and opened to the public on 23 July 1914 under the name The Old Mayor's House. Holm ran it for the next thirty-one years, and in that time he rescued around fifty more buildings the same way.

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Image: Gardar Rurak | CC BY-SA 4.0

Den Gamle By: A Museum for Townspeople

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leif Jørgensen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Open-air museums existed already in 1914, but they collected villages — farmhouses, barns, the rural past that nineteenth-century Europe was busy romanticising. Holm's museum did something no one had tried: it collected the market town, the købstad, with its merchants, workshops,...

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Image: Leif Jørgensen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Den Gamle By: Seventy-Five Buildings from Twenty Towns

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Liberaler Humanist, CC BY-SA 3.0. The town today is assembled from 75 historic structures drawn from twenty Danish townships, with three more in storage waiting their turn. The oldest is a storage house from Aalborg of around 1550; the youngest is a garden pavilion from that same 1909 exhibition. Between them sta...

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Image: Liberaler Humanist | CC BY-SA 3.0

Den Gamle By: Then the Museum Kept Going

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charlotte S H Jensen from København, Danmark, CC BY-SA 2.0. Most heritage museums stop somewhere around 1900, as though history politely ended there. Den Gamle By did not. Alongside the 1864 neighbourhood there is now a 1974 neighbourhood, complete with Rahbek's mini-market, a shop called Pouls Radio and an embroidery shop, all furnished ...

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Image: Charlotte S H Jensen from København, Danmark | CC BY-SA 2.0

Den Gamle By: The Flat That Is Usually Closed

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EHRENBERG Kommunikation, CC BY-SA 2.0. One three-room apartment in the museum is furnished as a 1950s home and is not open to the general public. It is the House of Memory, built for people living with dementia, along with their families and the staff who care for them. The premise is that the disease blocks the front...

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Image: EHRENBERG Kommunikation | CC BY-SA 2.0

Den Gamle By: In the Details

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Massimo Frasson from Italia, CC BY-SA 2.0. The collections inside the buildings reward slowing down. The Toy Museum holds some 6,000 pieces from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, including German Märklin cars and Bing trains, Danish Tekno models, and a quieter category: wooden toys made by inmates of Danish prisons. Th...

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Image: Massimo Frasson from Italia | CC BY-SA 2.0