Words by

Elías Þórsson

@Eliasthorsson

Photo by

Reykjavík Grapevine Archives

Until 1989, beer was illegal in Iceland. However, there was one place where beer was legal—the international airport in Keflavík. There, drunks entered an exotic beer-filled purgatory, where all their worries could be drowned before soaring up into the skies. Imagine boarding a plane not in an orderly boring queue, but as you would roll into a bar at three in the morning. And as the drunks got rowdy, rude and started fighting each other, a new word was born: ‘flugdólgur.’ Directly translated it means “flight pimp,” but the translation “flight hooligan” is perhaps more fitting. “Drunks on a plane,” basically.