Despite its arctic and isolated location, Tromsø is a cosmopolitan cultural center, known as “the Paris of the North”. Numerous international cultural events are held in this city, including festivals, concerts, master-classes, and theatrical performances. Tromsø International Film Festival is an annual event, held during the darkest days in January, which attracts film-makers and film buffs from around the world; among its award recipients are the 2004 Russian film The Return and the 2011 American film Black Swan.

The name of the music festival, “The Northern Lights”, derives from the phenomenon of Aurora Borealis, for which Tromsø is particularly famous. Tromsø University, the world’s northernmost institution of higher education, has a center dedicated to the study of the physics of this phenomenon. Tromsø University’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Theoretical Linguistics (CASTL) and the Centre for Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (CTCC) have both been designated Norwegian Centers of Excellence, and other key research fields include the polar environment, indigenous people, peace and conflict transformation, telemedicine, medical biology, space physics, and fishery science.

One of the highlights of this year’s music festival was a concert by Arkhangelsk State Chamber Orchestra from Russia. Arkhangelsk and Tromsø have been cooperating for many years in culture, youth politics, science, sport, and many other spheres of activity. This cooperation is not new: from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th Tromsø and Arkhangelsk were the two centers of the Pomor trade (named after the Russian settlers on the White Sea coast, the pomors). Russians came to Norwegian towns like Vardø, Vadsø, Hammerfest, and Tromsø in the summer months to exchange grain for surplus fish. Some sources say that “the Russian grain prevented starvation in northern Norway during the famine years in the beginning of the [19th] century, and Norwegian expansion and activity in Finnmark during the nineteenth century would have been unthinkable without the Russian trade.” This trade even engendered a Russian-Norwegian pidgin language, Russenorsk, which was in use until 1917 when the Russian revolution and the resulting Bolshevik regime put an end to the Pomor trade. Several written records of Russenorsk remain; they list sentences like Moja kopom fiska (‘I buy fish’), with moja and kopom derived from Russian, and fiska – a modified Norwegian word.

Today, cooperation in the Barents region involves a wider range of issues besides culture: oil exploration in the Barents sea, scientific investigation of the Arctic and of climate change, and security issues. It was also from Tromsø that British and Norwegian rescue vessels sailed in August 2000 in attempts to save the sunken Kursk submarine.

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