Coming to the Lofoten Islands in February-April, be prepared for such unusual pictures. What is there? Take a closer look at the photo. This is not a picture from a horror movie, but just peacefully drying cod heads.
They look at us with glazed eyes, show the whole world their gills or jaws with teeth, but they are silent. What else can they do? :)
As a matter of fact, their carcasses are not far away — they hang on higher, often multi-tiered dryers, sometimes several meters high. Under some structures, you can freely walk in full growth. The whole sky in codfish!
The fact is that Norway is the largest producer and exporter of dried (and not only) cod in the world; therefore, it is harvested there everywhere. But not always — unlike the coastal water cod (Torsk), which lives off the Norwegian coast all year round, the Atlantic cod (Skrei) comes to spawn for only a few months from the colder Barents Sea in the coastal waters near the Lofoten Islands.
So for a long time people came there, to the islands, in anticipation of its arrival. They built themselves small temporary houses, painted red, in which they lived during those few months of active fishing, while they were harvesting fish in large quantities. It is being dried even now according to the well-established, century-old rules.
In preparation for drying, large cod is gutted and decapitated, the carcasses are tied by the tails in pairs and suspended in the open air. In a couple of months in the cool winds of Norway, the fish completely loses moisture and can be stored for one to two years without losing its nutritional value. This is how fresh, unsalted cod is dried. The Norwegians also dry salted, but in smaller quantities, and the method is slightly different.
If earlier cod was eaten mainly by local and poor people, as well as sailors and travelers, nowadays it is considered a delicacy in many countries around the world — Norway annually exports tens and hundreds of thousands of tons of cod: fresh, frozen, salted and dried.
In general, during the short commercial fishing season for Atlantic cod, fish can be found hanging in the air throughout the Lofoten Islands during drying. More or less, but almost everywhere you can see at least a small dryer with a few fish. Well, and you will smell it, of course — fish is fish, and it smells accordingly, especially while it is still quite fresh :)
Most of the fresh and frozen cod goes to the Western European market. Dried and salted cod is mainly sent to the countries of West Africa, Latin America and the Mediterranean, and the best in quality (and there are quite a few quality gradations of cod in Norway) goes to Italy and, it seems, France and Portugal.
Of course, a lot of fish remains for the Norwegians themselves, they are happy to use it in different forms, and in every restaurant or cafe you can find cod dishes. Dried cod can be eaten as a snack, but in Norway it is also soaked and cooked in a variety of ways, making the fish even softer than fresh.
And dried fish heads also find their consumer — they are supplied to some African countries, for example, to Nigeria. A fish head contains a lot of protein, but costs less than whole carcasses. Often this part of fish, which is generally not very convenient for eating, is ground into flour and added to various dishes, thereby compensating for the small amount of protein in the diet.
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There, on the islands, life seemed to me so simple and unhurried ... And where the fishermen should hurry, they will catch their limit (and the industrial catch is strictly limited by the state) necessarily and often in the first half of the year.
For a couple of months, cod hangs in the open air and only birds sometimes try to steal it. Isn't that wonderful?
I am not a big fan of cod and, perhaps, do not fully understand the fascination with this fish. It tastes good, but, for example, salmon tastes much more delicious to me. But you can't deny it the picturesqueness of the drying process :) I am glad that I visited Lofoten exactly at the time when we can find it in such quantity — it was really interesting to look at this.
In this post, I used photographs taken in different settlements of the Lofoten Islands: Sakrisøya, Nusfjord, Svolvær, and maybe somewhere else. It would be great to go there again, but in the summer. Let's see, maybe in the future :)
It's better to watch the photo in high resolution.
OLYMPUS E-M1 Mark II
Exposure time: 1/30 sec
Aperture: F 10
Sensitivity: ISO 250
Focal length: 12 mm
35 mm equivalent: 24 mm
You can also see my photos in my blog LJ and in my profile on NatGeo