The city of Odda

The literature festival in Odda included this year images as well as words. Illustrators and comic creators were invited, also authors who had gotten their books transformed to films. Very interesting! In the video, a short glimpse of one of the factories Odda is renowned for. Other things to experience are the mountains, the fjord and the waterfalls. An ice glacier, Folgefonna, lies within walking distance of the city. Well, it´s a long walk, but, it´s possible.
Odda was also made famous by the great landslide that took several houses. In fact, it have had several such slides, albeit that was one of the biggest in this century, and since I was a little girl, I´ve heard about the really great slide, not yet occurred, the one everybody fears: a whole mountaintop over Tyssedal (the place where one of the other factories is situated) is prophesied to slide into the fjord, wiping out everything below. I hope it´ll never happen. There is a museum in Tyssedal which contains a great amount of the history of Odda and the whole fjord it lies by, the Sørfjorden (the south fjord).

The great factories, all about melting metal, smoke and fire, has had a great impact on the culture. Many authors from Odda celebrated the friendship and community spirit they had grown up with. It was the workers against "them", the directors, the farmers, the outsiders. The Union and the politics was important. It is still told a story about a first May celebration, when everybody were maching under the flags of their unions, how the communists and the worker´s unions collided and got into a massive fistfight, a long time ago.
People here are great storytellers. And this spirit, combined with the life as factory workers, have given them an unique way of expressing themselves. Several authors, playwrights and comic creators have grown up here.