{"id":140793,"date":"2026-08-05T13:12:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T13:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/140793\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T13:12:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T13:12:27","slug":"sea-change-faroe-islands-ponder-independence-from-denmark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/140793\/","title":{"rendered":"Sea Change: Faroe Islands Ponder Independence from Denmark"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everything flows to the ocean in the Faroe Islands. Mountain springs of mysterious origins run down pyramidal hills then drip off black cliff faces. All the springs lead to the Atlantic and all the roads lead to T\u00f3rshavn, the world\u2019s smallest capital city. T\u00f3rshavn, meaning \u201cThor\u2019s Harbour\u201d, is home to fewer than 13,000 people and the Faroe Islands\u2019 three traffic lights. It has a few consulates, plus a harbour where Faroese fisherman Carl August Arge arrives most mornings to sell his catch of Atlantic cod.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Faroe Islands is too small to be totally independent but, as far as it can, it should,\u201d says Arge, holding a metre-long fish aloft by its gills. He occasionally sights foreign vessels through the North Atlantic fog. \u201cAnd then I think about defence,\u201d he adds. \u201cWhat if the Russians came here one day?\u201d<\/p>\n

In this archipelago of 18 islands, green mountains rise out of glassy fjords, puffins roost on perilous cliffs and the capital is a friendly, doors-left-unlocked sort of place. Almost equidistant between Iceland, Scotland and Norway, the Faroes has been ruled by the Danish crown for more than 600 years. Danish police putter around its country roads; the healthcare system follows the Danish universal model; the currency is the Faroese kr\u00f3na. Yet unlike Denmark these islands never joined the EU and in the past few years, many Faroese argue, they\u2019re wealthier for it.<\/p>\n

Fish make up 95 per cent of Faroese exports, which have boomed since 2010. It began with rising industry prices and splendid stocks but has been bolstered since Faroese business circumvented Russia\u2019s ban on EU produce, imposed in retaliation for sanctions after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Faroese GDP grew by almost 8 per cent last year and much of its farmed salmon and trawler-caught pelagic fish land on Russian plates today. There\u2019s a defiant stance towards Brussels around here too; in 2013 the Faroes was slapped with a year-long ban from EU ports for overfishing.<\/p>\n

The buoyant economy has stirred old yearnings in the Faroese. Their language isn\u2019t Danish but derived from Old Norse and there\u2019s a rich Faroese culture beyond the patterned knitwear made famous by Nordic Noir TV dramas. (After a few F\u00f8royar bj\u00f3rs the locals tell you they\u2019re more Viking than the Danes.) Independence is revving up a potent political force as renewed self-confidence has led many Faroese to believe that casting off Danish subsidies is the way to a brighter future. For secessionists, memories of a 1946 referendum on independence, which was withdrawn by the Danish crown, still smarts. But is this latest zeal a push for isolationism, which could possibly break up the Danish kingdom, or a nation\u2019s bid for self-reliance?<\/p>\n

Just past Carl Arge\u2019s fish stand in T\u00f3rshavn, a headland juts into the bay and atop it is a clump of red-ochre wooden buildings where prime minister Aksel V Johannesen has his sea-view office. He\u2019s preparing to lead his country into a planned referendum in April on a constitution that could pave the way for future independence. \u201cThe constitution will define us as a nation, as a people, and if in future we want to leave the Danish kingdom then we Faroese will have the right to take the decision ourselves,\u201d says Johannesen. If it passes public approval (the vote itself is still up in the air given similar referendums have been postponed in the past), the constitution will replace the existing Danish one. It will enshrine the Faroese language and many islanders hope that it will cement the right to continue the grindadr\u00e1p, the infamous annual slaughter of pilot whales for meat and blubber that has turned Faroe waters red for hundreds of years.<\/p>\n

\"RedA near self-sufficient sheep farm on the isle of Kalsoy<\/p>\n

\"AIn 2007 the Church of the Faroe Islands broke away from the Danish Church<\/p>\n

\"WomanMost Faroese keep their traditional dress pressed for the \u00d3lavs\u00f8ka national day in July<\/p>\n

\"InteriorThe L\u00f8gting parliament building. The Faroe Islands was granted home rule in 1948<\/p>\n

\"InteriorJoannes Patursson is the 17th generation of farmer in his family. His farmhouse doubles as a museum<\/p>\n

\"White-paintedThe sea suffuses every facet of life in the Faroe Islands<\/p>\n

\"WomanGudrun & Gudrun is updating the traditional Faroese knitwear, made famous by Nordic Noir<\/p>\n

\"PortraitMusician Teitur Lassen, the Faroes\u2019 best-known cultural export after patterned jumpers<\/p>\n

\"AMany of the islands are connected by undersea tunnels<\/p>\n

\"AkselAksel V Johannesen, prime minister of the Faroe Islands<\/p>\n

\"FishermanFisherman Carl August Arge sells his weighty catch in T\u00f3rshavn harbour<\/p>\n

\"T\u00f3rshavnA Faroese proverb: \u2018Small boats sail as well as ships\u2019<\/p>\n

Every year the Faroes receives \u20ac86m from Denmark in subsidies. Copenhagen also handles foreign affairs and some courts. Outbreaks of sea lice decimated the farmed-salmon industry in the 1980s; in the 1990s, Copenhagen came to the rescue and bailed out debt-ridden Faroese banks. Is this country really ready for independence? \u201cNot at the moment,\u201d says the prime minister, whose Social Democrats currently want to remain part of the kingdom. \u201cBut 20 years ago the money we got from Denmark was one third of our budget.\u201d Today it\u2019s 13 per cent. \u201cIt\u2019s going slowly in the right direction. Becoming economically independent is the first goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

We stroll with Johannesen through T\u00f3rshavn\u2019s windy lanes en route to parliament, between vividly coloured houses with roofs carpeted in traditional Faroese bright-green turf. It\u2019s an unseasonably warm day on the islands, says the PM. A cruise ship rounds the capital\u2019s blue bay and a Russian-flagged trawler is moored in the harbour awaiting servicing. This morning Johannesen is about to debate a controversial new fisheries bill in the L\u00f8gting, the parliament building where Faroese hash out the matters of the day in the manner they have, some claim, since 1274. If passed, the bill will force foreign fishing businesses in the Faroes to be based in the islands and pay their taxes there.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a ruse to make the country more economically nimble and was proposed by the man who\u2019s now the face of Faroese independence: H\u00f8gni Hoydal. He wears a lapel badge of N\u00f3lsoyar P\u00e1ll, a Faroese adventurer who built his own boat in the 19th century and set sail for the UK. \u201cIt was only the Danish kings who could do that before him,\u201d says Hoydal, smoking a cigarette on the L\u00f8gting\u2019s well-tended patio during a brief recess. \u201cHe said we have to broaden our horizons and deal directly with other countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Minister of fisheries and leader of the opposition Republicans, Hoydal is an ideological bedfellow of the Scottish National Party and describes his party as a left-wing independence movement. He insists that neither this bill nor the independence push is \u201cnegative nationalism\u201d. \u201cThe political thinking has long been: we move ahead and if it goes wrong we\u2019ll get help from Denmark,\u201d says Hoydal. \u201cWe can prove that we have a self-reliant economy but we need the full power of our foreign policy. We don\u2019t want to be an isolated museum in the North Atlantic; we want to be part of the modern world and work directly with our neighbours. That\u2019s the key to our development.\u201d At present, every trade deal is co-signed by Denmark, which particularly irks republicans.<\/p>\n

As easy as it is to feel stirred by Hoydal\u2019s rhetoric, the islanders know their industries have run aground before. The government may be building cash reserves but there\u2019s also a possibility of another crisis \u2013 another outbreak of disease, say, or a sharp drop in fish stocks.<\/p>\n

Over in Copenhagen, the view is also rather dim. \u201cThe feeling is that Faroe Islanders are cocky and want independence when there are fish in the sea,\u201d says Jens Ringberg, a political analyst at DR, Denmark\u2019s national broadcaster. \u201cPoliticians in Denmark have no choice \u2013 they have to say politically correct things like \u2018We respect the Faroese people and the right of any nation to decide\u2019 \u2013 but for practical purposes they want the islands to forget about it. Or have the bloody referendum and have them vote no, then we can move forward as it has been between Denmark and Greenland for many years.\u201d (The wife of Danish prime minister Lars L\u00f8kke Rasmussen is Faroese.)<\/p>\n

Unlike Greenland, another part of the Danish commonwealth, the Faroes is less critical to Denmark\u2019s strategic interests in the Arctic. Ringberg says it\u2019s more a case of keeping the commonwealth together. Yet the Faroes\u2019 position, on the northern cusp of Europe, is still sensitive and there is good reason that the country was once part of Nato\u2019s early-warning-system network. The Faroese minister of foreign affairs, fresh from Moscow where he\u2019s been trying to ink a free-trade agreement, recalls the outlook 40 years ago when there were so many Soviet trawlers on the horizon that it lit up like a city. Among them, he adds, were more than a few spy ships and disguised military vessels.<\/p>\n

Concerns about defence, currently provided by the Danes, loom over the independence debate. Others worry that the constitutional referendum is a distraction from more concrete issues: what some islanders call a \u201cgender deficit\u201d on the islands (there are 1,500 fewer women than men) and fish stocks being mismanaged by big business.<\/p>\n

Yet there are also shoots of a more dependable economy. On Eysturoy, the second-largest island, Bakkafrost is a farmed-salmon empire with a grand and angular headquarters overlooking a fjord. Bakkafrost\u2019s CEO, Regin Jacobsen, says his business today represents 15 per cent of the country\u2019s GDP. The salmon is farmed chemical-free with a forensic attention to cleanliness that it is hoped will prevent any possible outbreak of salmon lice in the future. Tourism is growing as well. J\u00f3hanna \u00e1 Bergi, CEO of the national carrier Atlantic Airways, says she\u2019s facing stiff new competition since sas opened up routes to the islands via Copenhagen last year.<\/p>\n

On a coastline lined with black houses we pull in at Koks, a Faroese restaurant that proudly announces its first Michelin star on the front window. The head chef, Poul Andrias Ziska, works with five fishing boats that line-catch every fish it serves and is modernising some of the staples of Faroese cuisine. That includes the traditional diet of fermented lamb that\u2019s wind-blasted for months in special sheds to create a mouldy, gamey meat (it tastes better than it sounds). The clientele is almost entirely tourists.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we should be independent eventually but I have nothing against being part of the Danish realm either,\u201d says Ziska. \u201cI\u2019d hope we still have a relationship, it is so convenient.\u201d A journalist working for a local newspaper says that no one would ever talk of the Faroes in terms of being a colony these days. \u201cWe have the complete opposite situation in that we\u2019re treated really well,\u201d she says, yet she is also keenly in favour of independence.<\/p>\n

Like recent secession debates in Scotland, Catalonia and Iraqi Kurdistan, there is a layer to this that lies beyond the pragmatics of economy and governance. The need for self-determination is deeply felt, a hidden spring in the Faroese psyche. One folk tale goes that an outcrop of rocks standing offshore of the town of Ei\u00f0i are all that\u2019s left from when an Icelandic giant, hoping to steal the Faroe Islands, failed to drag them home. There may be a renewed spirit of independence in the air but not everyone is in a rush around here. Like the pace of life in T\u00f3rshavn, or the fishermen who wait for a decent day to do battle with the Atlantic, the Faroese are measured about the relationship. \u201cUm ikki \u00ed dag, so ver\u00f0ur ta\u00f0 \u00ed morgin\u201d is a Faroese saying that means: \u201cIf not today, then tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everything flows to the ocean in the Faroe Islands. Mountain springs of mysterious origins run down pyramidal hills…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,43,5167,9590],"class_list":["post-140793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-faroe-islands","tag-denmark","tag-faroe-islands","tag-independence","tag-torshavn"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/117043078813334181","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}