28.07.2003
Hans Christian Andersen’s flying trunk

“To travel is to live,” Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1844. Today, a hundred and fifty-nine years later, memories of the adventurous writer are as vivid as ever at Copenhagen Airport. The airport recently bought the huge trunk that accompanied Hans Christian Andersen on his journeys.

On the executive floor at the Copenhagen Airports’ headquarters is a trunk. It is big, in fact it is so big that it could hold Hans Christian Andersen himself with his long legs. The large trunk steams of adventure and interesting tales. Who knows if this very trunk flew to the land of the Turks and through the window to the princess in the fairy tale “The flying trunk”.   The year 2005 is the 200th anniversary of Hans Christian Andersen’s birth. As a prelude to the year of the bicentenary, the airport has acquired one of the trunks that accompanied the writer on many of his journeys.

   
The trunk will be displayed in the transit area when we get closer to the bicentenary.

‘To travel is to live’

”Hans Christian Andersen always felt a pain he referred to as ‘away sickness’. When the snow melted and the stork arrived, he felt this painful longing – a longing that brought him to all ends of the world,” wrote Danish daily Berlingske Tidende in an article on this immortal fairy-tale writer and adventurer. During his 70-year-long life, he made thirty long journeys, which, when added up, took up ten years of his life. During his journeys, he gathered inspiration for the fairy tales which children all over the world have been imbibed with.

“Therefore, it is only natural to display Hans Christian Andersen’s trunk at Copenhagen Airport,” says Deputy Director Merete Rønde. Last May she read in the paper that Hans Christian Andersen’s big trunk would be sold at an auction. “I just had to have that trunk,” Rønde adds, and she got it.

Rønde proudly shows Hans Christian Andersen’s trunk, which will be displayed in the transit area of Copenhagen Airport in 2005, the writer’s bicentenary.

To be displayed in 2005

According to Rønde, there is every reason that the trunk should be displayed at the airport:
“Copenhagen Airport is the obvious place for Hans Christian Andersen’s trunk. To many Scandinavians, the airport is the gateway to the world and the starting point of an exciting journey. Other people just travel through Copenhagen and see no more of Denmark than the airport. Therefore, the airport should reflect and be representative of our country. Hans Christian Andersen is one of the best known Danes in the world outside, and therefore it makes perfect sense to display his trunk right here,” Rønde comments.

The trunk will not be shown to the public until during the bicentenary in 2005. Until then, the trunk stands on the executive floor – if it does not take off on new adventures, that is.