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As you may be aware, I have decided to close Fika Online, effective 31st December 2022. The past five years covering Nordic lifestyle, culture and current affairs have flown by, and it has been a pleasure to watch this site grow and evolve. The blog has attracted readers on every continent, and I am proud to have welcomed hundreds of contributors, sharing a plethora of articles and podcast items on every aspect of life in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. I will be continuing to cover the Nordic countries in other capacities. But this is Fika Online’s final post, with the final Nor ..read more

Every year, two quirks mark Scandinavia’s Advent festivities. In Gävle (200 km north of Stockholm) a giant straw goat is erected and, in London, a tree has been shipped over from Norway… The Gävle Goat Sweden’s largest goat (or largest bonfire) goes up in at Slottstorget in Gävle’s city centre on the first day of Advent. Despite its illegality, fire padding, and threats of prosecution, the goat has been the target of repeated arson attacks since its first appearance in 1966 (one year, indeed, vandals waited callously to strike until guards had ducked into a nearby restaurant to escape the col ..read more

Best Norwegian Film Troll (Troll): Directed by Roar Uthaug Best Danish Film The Shift (The Shift): Directed by Lone Scherfig Best Swedish Film English Triangle of Sadness (Sans filtre): Directed by Ruben Östlund Best Finnish Film Hatching (Pahanhautoja): Directed by Hanna Bergholm Best Icelandic Film Godland (Volaða land): Directed by Hlynur Pálmason Best Nordic Series Cry Wolf (Ulven Kommer): Created by Maja Jul Larsen Best Nordic Documentary Budding Humans (Budding Humans): Directed by Gunhild Westhagen Magnor For the latest Nordic news, follow  ..read more

In southern Ukraine, as a byproduct of ceded territory, there’s a Swedish village. Now in the heart of President Putin’s southern offensive, it was shut off by his sham referendums… Xander Brett In the south-eastern corner of Ukraine, there’s a village where a resident still speaks a dialect of Swedish. This is Gammalsvenskby, and villagers are descendants of farmers relocated from an outpost of the Swedish Empire (now present-day Estonia) in 1781, when Sweden lost the Great Northern War to Russia. In 2022, over two hundred years later, they, like their ancestors, are under attack. Though the ..read more

Both the current Secretary General and his predecessor hail from the Nordic countries. We profile the men who’ve led NATO through a turbulent decade… Jens Stoltenberg Jens Stoltenberg served as Prime Minister of Norway from 2000-2001, and again from 2005 to 2013. Now aged 63, before the premiership he worked as an environment and finance minister. Nicknamed the ‘Norwegian Tony Blair’ for his Labour policies, his time in office involved the fallout from the 2011 attacks, along with the 2008 financial crash. Taking the NATO helm in 2014, he dealt with President Trump’s ambivalence to the allian ..read more

Releasing their first EP, Luxembourg-based band QUANTUM DOT have teamed up with Icelandic singer THORUNN EGILSDOTTIR… Founded by three students in Brussels (one has since left), this futuristic band have embarked on a mission to provide Nordic soundscapes to a European audience. To do so, they enlisted the help of The Voice of Germany star Thorunn Egilsdottir. Like her new bandmates, Egilsdottir lives and works in Luxembourg, and she grew up between that country and her native Iceland. Despite living in the confines of one of Europe’s smallest nations, however, the band say they only meet to ..read more

At the end of last month, an area of the Baltic Sea was turned into a giant jacuzzi. Unexpected damage to the Nord Stream gas pipelines had caused gas to leak out, and western countries were quick to point the blame… Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 are parallel pipes that run from Russia to Lubmim in Germany. Last year, Nord Stream 1 transported around 59.2b cubic metres of gas from Russia to Europe: the loss of which has contributed to Europe’s energy crisis. On 26th September, a series of explosions were detected in both pipes, with gas leaking to the surface in international waters, predom ..read more

Born in Lund, KIRSTEN RAUSING has become a stalwart of British breeding. She tells us about her childhood in Sweden, and how her passion for racing developed… On growing up in Sweden I was born in Lund, an academic town that’s dominated by its university. The university, indeed, is the oldest in Scandinavia, and I always think of Lund as the ‘Cambridge of Scandinavia’ because, like Cambridge, it’s so dominated by academia. That was particularly true when I was young. In those days, there were just 60,000 inhabitants, of which half were involved with the university in some way (either as teach ..read more