A 300-year-old poorhouse beside City Hall Square is now the living room of Grundtvig's Denmark. Vartov at Farvergade 27 traces its institution to 1607 (with roots back to Christian I's hospital of 1475) - a shelter for the city's poor, sick and old that wandered Copenhagen until settling in 1666 on the old royal dye-works ground that gave Farvergade its name. The present complex rose in stages: J.C. Krieger's two-storey wings of 1724-28 toward the old rampart, Philip de Lange's Farvergade wing of 1743, Vartov Church of 1754-55, and N.S. Nebelong's extra floors of the 1850s that brought capacity to some 500 residents. The buildings have been listed since 1918. The name belongs to Danish cultural history because of one tenant: N.F.S. Grundtvig - poet, pastor, politician and father of the folk high school movement - preached in Vartov Church for 33 years, from 1839 until his death in 1872, drawing congregations far beyond the hospital's residents and making the courtyard complex the informal capital of his movement. Niels Skovgaard's 1932 statue of Grundtvig watches over that courtyard still. When the hospital moved out in 1934, the church association now called Grundtvigsk Forum took over, and it owns and runs the house today. Modern Vartov is a full culture house hiding in plain sight beside Radhuspladsen: a library of works by and about Grundtvig, meeting rooms, a student dormitory, a kindergarten, the still-active church, and a year-round programme of communal singing - the beloved morning song tradition - debates, lectures, communal dinners and a late-summer festival, all built on Grundtvig's ideas of freedom, spirit and community. The courtyard oasis opens daily year-round, and events run several times a week; entry from Farvergade, one minute off the City Hall Square crowds.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: Farvergade 27, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1463

Website: https://grundtvig.dk

Serves Food