Duck into the tarred wooden alleys of a wharf that leans

Bergen's old wharf is a row of pointed wooden gables along the harbor, and behind them, running back from the water, a set of passages between more wooden buildings of two and three stories. All of it is timber, all of it is tarred dark, and almost none of it is at a right angle to anything else.

It sits on the harbor front, so getting there is a matter of walking along the water. The front row is the photograph everybody takes. The alleys are the reason to go in, and they begin as a gap between two houses that does not look like a way through.

Inside, the passages are floored with boards, hung with galleries and outside staircases, and lit mostly from the ends. The floors give slightly. The whole row tilts in several directions at once, which is the thing photographs never quite manage to show. The ground floors are shops and workshops, the smell is tar and old wood, and an hour goes without anybody noticing.

German merchants of the Hanseatic League set up an office here in 1360 and traded from it until 1754, when the properties passed to Norwegian owners. Fire took the quarter in 1702 and it was rebuilt on foundations that had been there since the 12th century, which is why the plan is medieval and the timber is not. Sixty-two of the wooden buildings still stand. A fire in 1955 destroyed part of the site, and the excavation that followed ran for thirteen years and turned up the medieval inscriptions now known by the wharf's name. It has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1979.