From Iceland — Now And Then: Bums & Barons

Words by

Photo by

Skarphéðinn Haraldsson

Jón Trausti Sigurðarson

The Grapevine office’s drunk past

This publication has operated out of the building pictured here, Hafnarstræti 15 in downtown Reykjavík, for almost two decades. While this building and its interior has remained exactly the same during these years, literally everything around it has transformed in Reykjavík’s tourism-fueled gentrification of the past 15 years. The building is just over a century old, and the businesses that have operated from here have been varied: a warehouse for a shipping company’s spare parts, a seller of fishing gear, a diaper store called Vera, and so on. During the past 46 years, the first floor has featured one of Iceland’s most resilient restaurants, Hornið, one of our favourites and the place that brought pizza to Iceland in 1979.

In the 1920s the first floor was occupied by a bar appropriately named Reykjavík Bar, and during that decade the state’s monopoly liquor store was nearby on the same street at number 5. The result of this was that Reykjavík’s drinking culture became centered around Hafnarstræti, and those who picked up the strong stuff in the liquor store a little too often would also frequent the dark rooms of Reykjavík Bar, and then, once drunk enough, get picked up by the police and tucked into a cell in the cellar of the stone building across the street. Since the cells were in the cellar (of course) and so close to the sea, the tide would actually flow into the prison cells. Yeah, how’s that for a bad hangover?

These unfortunates soon got a derogatory nickname – Reykjavík Barons – because they frequented Reykjavík Bar, passed out and often got arrested. This nickname was then abbreviated simply to róni, the latter half of the word baron, thus birthing the common Icelandic term for vagabonds, or homeless alcoholics, commonly referred to ever since as róni (singular) or rónar (plural).