Faroe Islands: Why People Choose to Live in the Harshest Place on Earth | 4K Travel Documentary

[00:00:10]In the middle of the North Atlantic, belonging to none of its neighbors, 18 islands rise from the ocean like something forced upward by a violence the geology hasn't forgotten. [music] No trees, no flat ground. Cliffs drop 600 m into water that is never warm and never still. [music] The grass is so saturated green, fed by rain on 280 days a year, it looks [music] less like vegetation and more like a color the ocean invented for itself. The fog moves through the valleys [music] like something that lives here and knows it. The light when it breaks through hits the water and the wet grass simultaneously [music] in a way that stops visitors midstep.

[00:00:44]The Pharaoh have been hearing the sound of waves against [music] ancient rock for a thousand years. Not as background noise, as a presence, a reminder that the ocean is not scenery here. It is the primary fact of existence. From above, the pharaohs look like dark shapes scattered across gray sea [music] by someone not thinking about convenience or human comfort. That is exactly what they are. [music] One of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. Chosen not despite the difficulty, but because of it. [music] This is the story of life in the Pharaoh Islands. To understand how Farohies people live, one must first understand the particular Pharaoh's relationship with smallness, which operates on these islands, not as a limitation to be overcome, but as a condition to be inhabited with the full weight of human seriousness. There are 54,000 people in the Pharaoh Islands.

[00:01:29]This is the population of a medium-sized provincial town in any continental European country. [music] Distributed across 18 islands connected by tunnels boarded through mountains and by fairies that cross the sounds between them and by a helicopter service that reaches the most isolated [music] communities when the weather which is always negotiating its terms with the terrain allows. In a place this small, the social fabric has a density and a texture that larger societies have largely lost. The [music] density of a place where everyone knows not merely who you are, but who your grandparents were [music] and what village your family came from and which boat your great uncle was lost on in the winter of a year that the community still [music] marks. This knowledge is not gossip. It is memory. And in the Pharaoh Islands, where the community's survival has depended [music] for a thousand years on the collective management of risk and resource, memory is not sentiment. It is survival [music] technology. The child who grows up in the village of Jove on the northeastern tip of Asteroy, where the natural harbor is a narrow gorge cut into the cliff by the sea, and the village sits above it in a cluster of turf roofed houses [music] that look as though they have been growing from the hillside rather than built upon it, grows up inside a community whose members have known each other for generations, whose conflicts and alliances and marriages and losses have accumulated into a social history so dense and so specific that an outsider would need years to begin to read it.

[00:02:57]The morning on the islands arrives when it [music] arrives with a quality of light that the Pharaoh have a particular relationship with because they have learned through generations of living in a place where the light is genuinely scarce for months at a time [music] to receive it without taking it for granted. in Torcham, the capital, which [music] is the smallest capital city in the world by population and which wears this distinction with the quiet confidence of a place that has never needed [music] size to justify its existence. The morning begins around the harbor where the fishing boats have been out since before four and are returning now with a particular heaviness of vessels [music] that have been doing serious work in serious water. The old town Tingaines, [music] that finger of land extending into the harbor, where the oldest wooden buildings in the pharaohs [music] stand in their red and black and yellow painted timber, their turf roofs thick with the same grass that covers the hillsides above them.

[00:03:47]Their foundations [music] continuous with the rock beneath in a way that suggests the buildings grew rather than were built. This old town receives the morning [music] light on its painted facades with the dignity of something that has been standing here since the medieval [music] period and has seen enough mornings to have an opinion about them. The harbor [music] itself is a working harbor in a way that the harbors of more touristic places have largely ceased to be. [music] The smell of diesel and fish and salt rope. The sound of winches and the cries of the kitty wakes that follow the boats in. The particular organized activity of men and women unloading, catches and hosing down decks, and checking equipment [music] with the unhurried efficiency of people performing tasks they have performed so many times that the actions have become physical [music] rather than cognitive, held in the hands and the body rather than in any conscious [music] process of decision-m making.

[00:04:47]The turf roof [music] is the Pharaoh Island's most immediately recognizable architectural statement, and it is worth pausing on at length because it is not, as it might appear to the visitor, arriving from a culture where roofing is a purely [music] technical problem with a standard industrial solution, merely a charming anacronism maintained for aesthetic [music] reasons or tourist appeal. The turf roof is an engineering solution developed over centuries [music] for the specific conditions of these islands. The extraordinary wind loads that the North Atlantic generates, the constant moisture that the 280 days of annual rainfall deposits, [music] the absence of conventional building materials that the isolation and the treelessness of the islands imposed on their inhabitants for the entirety of their habitation that happens also [music] to be beautiful that happens also to express in its living, breathing, seasonally [music] changing surface a particular Faroh's understanding that the built environment and the natural environment are not separate categories [music] require requiring separate management, but a single continuous system that the intelligent builder acknowledges rather than resists. [music] The grass that grows on the roof is the same grass that grows on the hillside. The soil that supports it [music] is the same soil that supports the pasture. The sheep, those small, sturdy, extraordinarily sure-footed Pharaoh sheep that outnumber the human population by a ratio of nearly 2:1 and whose wool and whose meat have [music] sustained this community since the Norse settlers arrived in the 9th century and named the islands Faroyar. The sheep islands occasionally grays on the lower roofs of the older buildings with a casualness that suggests [music] they have not been informed that this is architecturally notable. The turf roof [music] is in the deepest sense not a heritage preservation project or a concession to tourist photography. The architecture of the newer parts of Torcham and the larger villages reflects a different tension. The tension between the Pharaoh's instinct [music] for the local and the handmade and the specific and the forces of a globalized building culture that offers efficiency [music] and speed at the cost of distinctiveness. The concrete apartment blocks that went up in the mid- 20th century when the fishing economy was expanding rapidly in housing was needed faster than traditional methods could provide [music] stand in the Pharaoh landscape with the particular awkwardness of buildings that were designed without reference to the place they would occupy. buildings that could have been built anywhere and therefore feel in a landscape [music] of such specific and demanding character like a category error. And yet the Pharaoh have done with these buildings what they do with most things. They have incorporated them, grown around them, softened their edges with gardens and painted their facades in the earth colors of the landscape. And the overall impression of even the newer parts of Torchin is of a city that has decided without any formal civic debate that the relationship between its built fabric and its natural setting is a relationship [music] worth tending. The flower boxes appear in the windows of the concrete buildings in spring. With the same determination as they appear on the turf roofed cottages, [music] the vegetable plots are maintained in the thin soil behind the apartment blocks with the same seriousness as those [music] behind the old farmouses.

[00:07:56]Pharaoh's daily life is organized around a concept that the language expresses in a word that has no precise equivalent in any other tongue. Lecting the ancient parliament [music] that has been meeting on these islands since 8:25 AD on the flat field of Tinges where the original Norse settlers [music] gathered to resolve their disputes and establish the terms of their common life making it one of the oldest continuously functioning parliamentary institutions in the world is not got merely a political body in the Farohies [music] understanding it is the expression of a particular Pharaoh's understanding of self-governance as a [music] condition of identity itself the institutional form taken by a community's ancient and repeatedly tested insistence that it retains the right to [music] determine the terms of its own existence regardless of the larger political arrangements that surround [music] and press upon it. The Pharaoh Islands are an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, self-governing in almost everything except foreign policy [music] and defense. And this arrangement negotiated through the particular trauma of the Second World War when British occupation cut the islands off from Danish administration [music] and the Farohies governed themselves by necessity and discovered in the experience a confirmation of what they had always suspected about their own capacity reflects the deepest feature of Farohise political character which is the principled refusal to accept that smallness and remoteness are arguments for dependence. The lugging that meets in its building on Ting James today in a chamber where the debates are conducted in Farohies [music] and the decisions affect every dimension of daily life from fishing quotas to school [music] curricula to the terms of the undersea tunnels that now connect the islands in a network that the 19th century could not [music] have imagined is the direct institutional descendant of the thing that gathered on the same ground 1200 years ago. This continuity is not ceremonial. [music] It is constitutional.

[00:09:51]Fishing industry is not one sector of the Farohiz economy among others. It is the foundation on which every other aspect of Fuise life rests. The primary fact around [music] which the community has organized itself since the first Norse settlers discovered that these [music] waters were among the most productive in the North Atlantic and that the skill to harvest them was the skill most [music] worth developing. The relationship between this community and the sea that surrounds it on every side is a relationship of the particular depth and complexity that [music] develops only when the dependence is total and the generations are long. When the same families have been fishing the same waters for centuries. When the knowledge of where the fish run and in what season and under what weather conditions [music] has been accumulated through a process of intergenerational transmission so continuous [music] and so detailed that it constitutes a science as rigorous as any conducted in a laboratory. expressed not in published papers but in the [music] practiced judgment of an experienced skipper reading the color of the water and the behavior of the birds and the feel of the current against the hull the Atlantic cod and the Atlantic salmon and the blue whiting and the mackerel and the seathing that the Pharaoh fleet pursues [music] across the North Atlantic constitute more than 90% of the island's export earnings [music] and this concentration of economic dependence on a single resource would be a [music] catastrophic vulnerability in a community less expert at managing relationship between extraction and sustainability. The Farohies fishing industry [music] is among the most technically sophisticated and scientifically managed in the world. Its quota systems developed [music] through painful experience of what collapse looks like. Its aquaculture technology producing Atlantic salmon in the cold, clear waters of the [music] fjords at a quality that commands premium prices in the markets of Japan and the United States and the restaurants of Copenhagen and London. And this sophistication is not the product of imported [music] expertise or outside investment. It is the accumulated knowledge of a community [music] that has been fishing these waters for a thousand years and has learned through the repeated and sometimes catastrophic [music] experience of abundance followed by collapse followed by cautious rebuilding that the sea's generosity is not unconditional and that the conditions it imposes must be respected with a seriousness that [music] short-term economic calculation cannot be trusted to provide on its own. The fisherman who goes out before dawn in February when the sea temperature is 2° [music] and the swell is running at 6 m and the horizon is invisible in the gray Atlantic merc is not being [music] reckless or indifferent to his own safety. He is doing what his father did and what his father's father [music] did in water that his family has known for generations with equipment that is better [music] and charts that are more accurate and a weather forecast delivered to his phone rather than read in the clouds but with the same fundamental orientation toward the sea that the Norse settlers brought with them in the 9th century. The orientation of people for whom the ocean is not an obstacle or a backdrop but the primary arena of meaningful human activity. The place where the work that matters most [music] gets done.

[00:12:56]The salmon farming that has transformed the Farohiz economy over the past four [music] decades deserves particular attention because it represents one of the more remarkable examples of a small community [music] successfully navigating the transition from a purely extractive relationship with its natural environment to a managed and sustainable one. The fjords of the pharaohs with their cold clean water and their strong currents that keep the oxygen levels high [music] and prevent the accumulation of waste turned out to be almost perfectly suited to the intensive farming of Atlantic salmon. And the Farohise aquaculture industry that developed in these conditions [music] has grown into one of the dominant forces in the global salmon market, producing fish of extraordinary quality that [music] are processed on the islands and shipped fresh to markets across Europe and Asia within 24 [music] hours of harvest. The salmon farms visible from the ferry routes between [music] the islands, those circular floating cages with their feeding systems and their monitoring [music] equipment and their occasional attendance by small workboats are not beautiful in the way that the landscape around them is beautiful. [music] They are functional, utilitarian, the visible expression of an economic necessity that the community has chosen to [music] meet in this particular way rather than others. But the Pharaoh's relationship with these farms is the relationship of owners rather than employees of a community that has decided collectively [music] how its natural resources will be used and retains the political and regulatory authority to enforce that decision.

[00:14:20][music] A relationship that the fishing communities of many other small island territories whose [music] resources were extracted by outside interests under terms they could not control understand the value of in ways that the Pharaoh who have maintained their own governance through [music] 12 centuries sometimes take for granted.

[00:14:57]The Farohies language is a small miracle of cultural survival [music] whose story deserves to be told with the fullness it merits. closely related to Icelandic and to the old Norse that the original [music] settlers brought with them in the long ships of the 9th century, carrying their language across the North Sea as carefully as they carried their tools and their livestock and [music] their knowledge of how to navigate by stars in open water. Farohies was suppressed by Danish colonial administration for [music] a period of several centuries. removed from official use, banned from the church services and the schools and the administrative documents [music] through which the colonial relationship expressed its authority, replaced in the written record by Danish so thoroughly that by the 19th century the pharaohise language existed nowhere in official form and yet [music] it survived. It survived in the oral tradition in the quai. Those ancient ballad poems of enormous length and extraordinary narrative complexity, some of them running to hundreds of verses that carry in their meter and their imagery and their linguistic forms the [snorts] full history of a people's relationship with the Norse [music] mythological and heroic tradition passed from generation to generation in the chain dances that are the pharaoh's most distinctive and most irreplaceable cultural form. Sung by the participants in a human [music] circle that constituted the living archive of everything. the colonial administration had attempted to remove from official existence. The chance is not a performance. It is a transmission.

[00:16:17][music] The person in the circle learning the quai from the person beside them is not being entertained. They are being educated in the deepest sense. Being given the knowledge that defines membership in the community. The knowledge that has been kept alive in exactly [music] this way, in exactly this human chain for centuries. The standardization of written foes and its [music] restoration to official use in the 20th century. the work of scholars and poets and ordinary people who understood that the survival of a language requires not only its speaking but its writing, its institutionalization, its use in the domains from which it had been excluded.

[00:16:50]This restoration is one of the more significant acts of cultural reclamation in modern European history [music] achieved not through violence or political revolution but through the patient generational work of a community that refused [music] to accept a permanent loss as a permanent condition.

[00:17:05]Today, Farohies is the language of government and education and daily commerce and literature and the internet and the [music] music that young Farohies musicians produce in studios and tour and [music] distribute to streaming platforms where it finds audiences that its creators grandparents could not have imagined and the Farohies who coins a new word for a new technology [music] rather than borrowing the English term.

[00:17:27]who calls the computer telder from the old Norse for counter who finds in the resources of their own ancient language the vocabulary for a new world is not being parochial or resistant to modernity. They are being responsible in the particular way that small language communities must be responsible if they are to survive actively [music] deliberately with the creativity that treats the language not as a museum object to be preserved in its original condition but as a living instrument [music] to be extended into new domains.

[00:17:54]Because a language that cannot name the present is a language already beginning to retreat from it.

[00:18:07]The food of the Pharaoh Islands is a cuisine of preservation and patience, [music] and the particular honesty of ingredients that have survived the demands of North Atlantic life developed in a place where winter is long and supply chains have always been contingent on the weather and the sea, and where the knowledge of how to make what the land [music] and sea produce last. Through the months when they produce little has been elevated over centuries of accumulated practice into something approaching an art form.

[00:18:33]Scarpicut wind dried mutton hung in the jalur. The traditional wooden drying shed whose slatted [music] walls allow the particular faries wind to do the work that in other food cultures heat or [music] salt or smoke would do is the archipelago's most distinctive food and its most philosophically interesting.

[00:18:49]The mutton hangs in the jalur for months, sometimes for the better part of a year. The wind and the [music] cold and the particular mineral quality of the Atlantic air working on the meat in ways that produce a flavor of such concentrated complex almost geological intensity. Fermented and deeply savory and [music] possessed of an earthiness that seems to contain the entire landscape of its production. The grass and the salt air and the cold [music] and the patience that it divides opinion among outsiders as definitively as any flavor experience available anywhere in the world. [music] To the Pharaohies, scarpic is not an acquired taste requiring gradual approach. [music] It is the taste of home, of winter, of the particular comfort of eating something that your great-grandmother also ate, [music] preserved by the same wind that is currently moving through the valley outside your window, carrying the same salt from the same ocean. It is food as memory, as place, [music] as the specific flavor of belonging to somewhere very particular on the surface of the earth and eating it [music] in a Faroh's kitchen in the middle of winter while the wind works on the next batch in the jalur outside [music] is to understand something about the relationship between food and identity that the globally sourced supermarket diet of the modern world has made difficult to access through any other means. The race lamb, semi-dried and fermented to a degree less extreme than the scarpicette, is eaten boiled with root vegetables in a dish whose simplicity is deceptive, whose flavor is a complexity that hours of slow cooking [music] from more exotic ingredients rarely achieves. Because the complexity is not in the preparation, but in the raw material itself, in the months of wind and cold that have concentrated the lamb's flavor [music] to an intensity that no fresh meat, however well-raised, can replicate.

[00:20:32]The Pharaoh's relationship with the grind, the pilot whale drive that has been practiced on these islands for at least [music] a thousand years and that periodically draws the focused attention and the organized condemnation [music] of the outside world is perhaps the most contested and the misunderstood expression of the Faroh's relationship between culture and subsistence, [music] between the rights of a small community to determine the terms of its own food culture and the claim of a larger and more powerful outside world to [music] impose its ethical framework on practices that it finds troubling from a distance it has [music] never had to cross. The grind is not sport in the Pharaoh's understanding and has never been framed as such [music] within the community. It is a communal food harvest regulated with considerable care by the same selecting that regulates everything [music] else. Conducted according to rules developed and refined over centuries of practice [music] in producing meat and blubber that are distributed freely and without commercial transaction among the participants [music] and the wider community according to a system of allocation that reflects the communal rather than the individual nature of the enterprise. [music] To understand the grind is to understand that it developed as a primary source of protein for a population living on islands where the growing season is short, the agricultural land minimal, and the distance from any continental food [music] supply, large enough that the logistics of regular importation were for most of the island's history simply unavailable. The pilot whale that arrived in the bays of the pharaohs in sufficient numbers to be herded ashore was not a recreational opportunity. It was a nutritional [music] event of the first importance. Providing food for the winter in quantities that the island's domestic agriculture could not approach and the community's capacity to organize rapidly and effectively around it harvest was a survival skill in the most literal sense. [music] The Pharaoh who engaged seriously with the ethical questions that the outside world raises about this practice. Many do, particularly among the younger generation that has grown up simultaneously inside the tradition [music] and inside the global conversation about animal welfare and sustainable [music] food systems are not defending cruelty.

[00:22:32]They are defending the right of their community to determine the terms of its own relationship with the natural world that surrounds and has always sustained it. A right they have been exercising [music] for longer than most of the countries currently criticizing them.

[00:22:45]Have existed as organized political entities. This is not a resolution of the ethical [music] questions. It is a context within which those questions must be honestly held.

[00:23:01]The Pharaoh summer compressed [music] and luminous and inhabited with the particular urgency of people who know with complete certainty how short it is and how long the winter that follows it will be transforms the islands into something that the November months make genuinely [music] difficult to imagine.

[00:23:17]The light in June and July arrives before 3:00 in the morning and persists until midnight. [music] And the Pharaoh's response to this abundance of light is a complete and unself-conscious reorganization of outdoor life. The hiking trails that connect [music] the villages across the mountain ridges and along the clifftops marked with canaires of stack stone placed at intervals calibrated to the visibility conditions of this [music] particular landscape rather than with painted signs and information boards. Because the Pharaoh understand that a landscape of this character should be read rather than annotated, filled with walkers of every age [music] moving between summits from which the full extent of the archipelago is visible on a clear day. Island after island rises from the [music] sea in a chain that extends to the horizon and sometimes beyond it into a blue distance where the separation between ocean and sky becomes uncertain. Each island inhabited, each one known by name and by the particular character that its terrain and its history have given it.

[00:24:12]Vagar with its dramatic lake suspended above the sea at Servogen. The optical illusion of its surface appearing higher than the ocean below it creating an image that photography has not exhausted and the eye still receives with a slight shock of disorientation. Coloy, the thin island, its villages connected [music] by a single road that passes through the mountain in tunnels barely wide enough for a single vehicle. The lighthouse at its northern tip, reachable only on foot across a ridge from which the Atlantic is visible on both sides simultaneously.

[00:24:40]Mikines, the westernmost island, where the puffins nest in such numbers on the clifftops, that the ground itself seems to be moving [music] during the summer months, and where the crossing from Survager by ferry is contingent on weather conditions, that the captain [music] assesses with the experiential judgment of someone who has made this crossing several hundred times, and knows the difference between the sea that looks rough, but is manageable, and the sea [music] that looks manageable and is not. The Pharaoh do not experience their landscape as tourists experience it with the compressed attention of people trying to take [music] in as much as possible before the ferry leaves. They inhabit it which is a different and in many ways deeper relationship. The relationship of people who have walked these [music] paths since childhood and who know which ridge the wind comes over first and where the fulmar nests [music] and at what point on the descent to Gasadolure. The waterfall that drops directly into the sea at Mulafoser becomes audible before it becomes visible because this knowledge is part of what it [music] means to be from here rather than from somewhere else. And the distinction between being from here and merely visiting here is in the Pharaoh's understanding [music] not a social distinction but an existential one.

[00:25:57]The young people of the Pharaoh Islands occupy a position of particular [music] tension and particular clarity that the community has been navigating with remarkable thoughtfulness across several generations of the modern era. The islands are small enough that a young person of intellectual ambition or professional aspiration must [music] leave them for university in Copenhagen or Rekuik or Edinburgh or further for the professional opportunities [music] and the breadth of cultural experience that the domestic scale of the islands cannot provide for the particular and irreplaceable education that comes from living in a place that is not [music] the place you grew up in. Discovering in the contrast what is universal and what is specific about the life you have known. The University of the Pharaoh Islands, established in 1965 and growing slowly into an institution of genuine academic seriousness, [music] can provide undergraduate education in an expanding range of fields. But the Pharaoh student who wants to study marine biology at graduate level or practice neurosurgery or write a doctoral thesis in comparative [music] linguistics will need to leave. And the community has long since made its peace with this necessity by developing over generations a culture of return. The rate of return migration to the Pharaoh Islands is among the highest of any small island community in the world. And the people who return do so [music] having accumulated in their years abroad not only the professional credentials the [music] community needs, but a perspective on what the islands are and what they offer that residents from birth does [music] not easily produce.

[00:27:23]The Farohise doctor who trained in Copenhagen and the Farohise software engineer who spent 5 years in London and the Farohise chef who worked in [music] three Michelin star restaurant in Copenhagen.

[00:27:34]before returning to open a restaurant in Torcham that applies the techniques of international fine dining to the specific and extraordinary ingredients of the Farohiz [music] lard. The scarpicude and the raced fish and the fresh lamb and the sea urchins pulled from the cold water below the cliffs.

[00:27:49]These people [music] bring back to the islands a knowledge and a perspective that enriches the community's understanding of itself [music] that allows it to maintain its distinctiveness not through isolation but through the confident engagement with [music] the outside world of people who have been outside and chosen with full knowledge of what they were choosing [music] between to come home.

[00:28:15]The darkness of the Farohies winter is not metaphorical and not subtle. Between November and February, the sun barely clears the mountain ridges before it begins its reluctant descent again. And the quality of the light on the shortest [music] days, arriving late, leaving early, filtered through the cloud and mist that the North Atlantic generates [music] with the regular regularity of a machine that has been running without interruption for geological time reduces the landscape [music] to a study in grays and puter blues that is genuinely beautiful in the way that austerity is genuinely beautiful when it is absolute and consistent and not pretending to be anything other than what it is. The Pharaoh have not developed [music] as some northern peoples have a cultural pathology around this darkness. They have developed around it instead [music] a set of cultural practices whose function is to generate within the community itself the warmth and light and human connection that the [music] landscape withholds. The Pharaoh's home in winter is a place of particular intentionality. [music] Candles lit before 4 in the afternoon not as decoration but as a considered response to the quality of the light outside. [music] The kitchen warm with the long cooking that the winter dishes require. The table set not for the quick meal of a busy evening, but for the slow dinner, of a dark night when there is nowhere else to be and no [music] good reason to be elsewhere. And the company around the table is the whole point of the evening rather than its backdrop.

[00:29:33]The tradition [music] of chain dancing, that ancient and irreplaceable form of communal movement in which participants join hands in a circle and move together to the rhythm of the quai being sung by the group itself without instruments, without a stage or an audience, the human voice and the human body and [music] the human hand in the hand of the person beside you sufficient is a winter. practice as much as a cultural one. A way of generating in the community hall of a small village on a February evening when the wind is coming in from the northwest at 50 knots and the sea is running white in the sound between the islands. A warmth that is simultaneously physical and social [music] and historical and that no other activity quite replicates. The dance forms a circle because the circle has no beginning and no end. [music] Because in a community of 54,000 people on 18 islands in the North Atlantic,