Halfdan Was Here (527 words)

Viking graffiti in the Hagia Sophia

About a thousand years ago, a Viking warrior found himself far from home, standing in the jeweled light of Constantinople’s legendary Hagia Sophia cathedral. It was the largest sacred building in the world, ancient even in those days. We know the Viking was there because, in a small act of presumably enjoyable desecration, he carved stick-like letters of his runic alphabet into the church’s marble balustrade. A millennium of touches later, his words have been rubbed nearly smooth. But scholars agree that part of it says, simply, “Halfdan was here.”

It’s hard to imagine two more different cultures than the Vikings and the Byzantine Empire, but they both reached their peaks during the same centuries. The Vikings are best known for rampaging through Scotland and England, for founding Iceland and even making it all the way to North America. But they also explored south, along the rivers of modern-day Russia. They opened up a lucrative trade route with Constantinople, the largest and most cosmopolitan city in Europe, situated as it was, and is, straddling Europe and Asia. The endpoint of the Silk Road.

At that time, the Byzantine emperor kept an elite household unit of Viking bodyguards—mercenary soldiers, really, called The Varangian Guard, from the Old Norse word for “pledge companion”. The tall, fair-haired Norsemen with their exotic battle axes were regarded with awe as fearsome warriors. They appeared with the emperor in public, protected him in private, and were very well paid. It is most likely that our Halfdan was a member of the Varangian Guard.

To the sophisticated denizens of Constantinople, the Vikings must have had the kind of outlandish glamour one attributes to cultures that seem savage in comparison with one’s own. The Byzantines had inherited steel metallurgy from old Rome, but the Vikings still used iron, their raw, freshly-acquired Christianity shot through with pagan customs, their aesthetics—their very bodies—so different from the customs and people in that great old city.

And what must these Norse mercenaries, seeking fortune and adventure—what must they have thought of Constantinople? Specifically, standing amid the glittering mosaic tiles of the immense Hagia Sophia, what must the Vikings have thought of the wealth and grandeur?

A simplified rendering of how the Hagia Sophia might have looked c. 1000 AD

It’s almost crazy, the differences. But in the moment Halfdan carved his name into the marble, the distance between these two civilizations collapsed. And today, not only are the distances collapsed, but time, too. What would Halfdan think if he had known that 1,000 years into the future, people would be imagining him on that balcony as he insisted on his existence, recording it for the ages? There is a kind of magic in that time travel, that compression of centuries.

Our whole history as a species is a long succession of different cultures butting up against each other. We have always been as exotic to each other as we are unthinkingly familiar and intimate to ourselves. The world has become small, so much smaller than it was when Halfdan carved his name. And here we are, still wanting to assert our existence, still bumping up against each other, telling each other that we are here. We are all here, together.