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ican people. A yoik is used to capture and express the essence of a mountain, wolf, lost friend or loved one. Listening to that guttural, repetitive, hypnotic mel- ody while the fire crackles in the polar night is like touching something primal. Two faces of the same ice Tromsø in November is, thus, a place of ultimate contrasts and a meeting point for two completely contrasting human natures. On the one hand, in the display cases of the Polar Museum, we see hu- man ambition, defiance and man’s need to conquer nature, reach the end of the world and overcome the icy expanse. On the other, just a few kilometres away, in the serenity of Sámi tents, we learn a lesson about modesty, about how not to fight with the ice, but rather to live on it respectfully. Both stories begin here, at the gateway to the Arctic. Roald Amundsen na skijama tokom ekspedicije na Severni pol 1925. godine Roald Amundsen on skis during a North Pole expedition in 1925
ples of the North - the Inuit of Green- land and the Sámi people of Scandina- via. They discarded the heavy wool that would freeze as soon as it got wet, dress- ing instead in light and incredibly warm fur coats and reindeer skin boots. They abandoned heavy machines and ponies, and learned from the natives how to com- municate with sled dogs, who moved over the snow with the elegance of the wind. Guardians of arctic harmony To really understand those ancient “teachers of the North”, it is enough to drive just half an hour north of Tromsø, where the urban world is lost in endless fields of snow. There, in the expanses that locals call Sápmi, live the autochthonous Sámi people – the only recognised indig- enous people of the European Union and Scandinavia, whose territory extends over the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula. They have occupied these lands for thousands of years, led by the philosophy that man doesn’t own nature, but rather belongs to it. Interestingly, their history is deeply intertwined with the legendary Vi- kings, though they are two completely dif- ferent peoples. While the Vikings (Norse tribes) were farmers, seafarers and con- querors obsessed with glory, the Sámi (of Finno-Ugric descent) were quiet nomadic hunters. They lived in the same area and traded a lot – the Vikings depended on the Sámi people, who sold them expen- sive furs and walrus tusks that they would trade on European markets. The Norwe- gian sagas often mention the Sámi people with a sense of awe, attributing to them powerful magical skills and control over the weather, but also asking them to build their famous Viking ships, as the Sámi were master woodworkers.
Visiting a Sámi camp in November is a perspective-shifting experience. Un- der a sky dominated by the intertwin- ing green and purple bands of the Au- rora Borealis, you will be welcomed by herds of hundreds of reindeer. After feeding these tame, inquisitive crea- tures, whose hooves crunch softly on the pristine snow, you enter a lavvu, a traditional Sámi tent that closely resem- bles a native American teepee. While temperatures outside drop well below zero, a fire crackles in the middle of the tent. The smell of smoke mixes with the aroma of strong, black coffee brewed in a charred pot and the smell of bidos – a traditional thick stew made from rein- deer meat and potatoes that warms the body from the inside. And then comes silence, interrupted only by the sound of a yoik. Not a po- em in the classical sense, a yoik has no beginning, verse or end, and rarely has words. It is the oldest European vocal tradition that is remarkably reminiscent of the chants of indigenous North Amer-
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