Timeline of Oslo

A trading place at the head of the fjord. Oslo is founded at the mouth of the Alna below the Ekeberg ridge, traditionally by Harald Hardrada — the king who died at Stamford Bridge in 1066 — though the archaeology suggests a settlement a little earlier. The ruins are still there.

A bishop’s seat. A diocese is established at Oslo and work begins on St Hallvard’s Cathedral, named for the local saint who was killed defending a pregnant woman and is on the city’s seal.

English monks on Hovedøya. Cistercians from Kirkstead in Lincolnshire found an abbey on the island in the fjord. The ruins are open, free and unfenced ten minutes from the town hall.

The capital, and a fortress. Håkon V moves the seat of the Norwegian kingdom from Bergen to Oslo and begins building Akershus on the headland. It is besieged repeatedly over the following centuries and never taken by force.

The Black Death. Plague arrives at Bergen and reaches Oslo within months. Somewhere between a half and two-thirds of Norway’s population dies. The country never recovers its medieval independence.

Four centuries under Denmark. Norway enters a union with Denmark that lasts 434 years. The court, the church and the money move to Copenhagen, and written Norwegian effectively disappears from administration.

The Reformation. Norway is declared a Danish province and Lutheranism is imposed. Church property is confiscated, the monasteries dissolved, and the archbishopric abolished. Oslo becomes a provincial town of a few thousand people.

Burned in a war it was not fighting. Oslo is put to the torch during the Northern Seven Years’ War — by its own defenders, to deny it to a Swedish army. It is one of many fires; the town is built of wood.

The fire, and a new name. A fire burns for three days and destroys almost all of medieval Oslo. Christian IV comes, looks at the ruins, and moves the city west under the guns of Akershus — laid out on a grid, built in brick and stone, and renamed Christiania after himself.

The post goes out. Norway’s first postal service is established, running from Christiania to Copenhagen and along the coast. The route to Trondheim is carried by farmers obliged to do it as a duty, which is how mail moved in Norway for the next two centuries.

A cathedral for the new city. Work begins on the church that becomes Oslo Cathedral, consecrated in 1697 on Stortorvet. It is where the city gathered after 22 July 2011, when the square outside filled with flowers metres deep.

Charles XII takes the town. The Swedish king occupies Christiania for two months but cannot take Akershus and withdraws. He is killed at Fredriksten two years later.

The timber patriciate. Christiania grows rich on the sawmills of the Akerselva and the export of Norwegian timber to the Netherlands and Britain — much of Amsterdam stands on Norwegian pine. A merchant class builds the town houses that survive around Kvadraturen.

Nine thousand people. The first proper census counts Christiania at under ten thousand — smaller than a market town in England, and the administrative centre of a country of nine hundred thousand governed from Copenhagen.

A university at last. After decades of Norwegian petitioning, Frederik VI permits a university in Christiania — the country’s first, and a precondition for everything that follows. Until then, Norwegians had to study in Copenhagen.

Handed over, and refusing to go. Denmark backs Napoleon and loses. The Treaty of Kiel transfers Norway to Sweden. Norwegians decline, meet at Eidsvoll, and adopt a constitution on 17 May — still the national day. A short war ends in a personal union with Sweden on Norwegian terms.

The palace is begun. Building starts on the Royal Palace for Karl Johan — the French marshal Bernadotte, now king of Sweden and Norway. It opens in 1849, at the top of the street named after him, and to this day has no fence around it.

The first railway. The line from Christiania to Eidsvoll opens, built with British capital and British engineers. Industry follows along the Akerselva, and the tenements of Grünerløkka go up to house the workers.

A parliament building. The Storting opens its yellow-brick semicircular house on Karl Johans gate. Parliamentary government — the principle that ministers answer to parliament rather than the king — is established after a constitutional battle in 1884.

Nansen crosses Greenland. Fridtjof Nansen and five companions cross the Greenland ice cap on skis, east to west, having burned their boats behind them. Polar exploration and Norwegian national identity become the same project.

The Scream. Munch paints the version now in the National Museum. He later adds a pencil line in the sky — could only have been painted by a madman — in his own hand. The same year, Fram sails into the Arctic ice to drift.

The National Theatre. Opens on Karl Johans gate with statues of Ibsen and Bjørnson outside. Ibsen, living a few streets away, walks to the same café table at the same time every day until his death in 1906.

The union dissolved. After a constitutional crisis, Norway dissolves the union with Sweden peacefully. The referendum goes 368,208 to 184. A second vote chooses monarchy over republic, and a Danish prince arrives as Haakon VII.

The South Pole. Roald Amundsen, having sailed south in Fram after telling almost nobody where he was going, reaches the South Pole on 14 December — thirty-four days before Scott, using dogs, skis and techniques learned from the Netsilik Inuit. His whole party returns alive.

Women get the vote. Norway grants universal female suffrage, among the first countries in the world and the first sovereign state in Europe to do so.

Oslo again. Twenty years after independence, Christiania resumes the name it lost in 1624. The same year, a Lillehammer man patents the ostehøvel — the cheese slicer — which is not unrelated to how Norwegians think about themselves.

The Blücher goes down. Germany invades on 9 April. At Oscarsborg, a fort with fifty-year-old guns, Colonel Birger Eriksen fires without orders and sinks a brand-new heavy cruiser carrying the men meant to seize Oslo. The King, the government and the gold reserves get out on a train.

Liberation, and a trial at Akershus. Germany surrenders in Norway on 8 May and Haakon VII returns on 7 June, five years to the day since he left. Vidkun Quisling is executed by firing squad in the fortress courtyard in October.

The City Hall opens. Begun in 1931 and delayed by the war, Rådhuset opens for Oslo’s 900th anniversary, covered inside with murals of labour, industry and resistance. Oslo has been arguing about the exterior ever since.

The Winter Olympics. Oslo hosts the Games — the first Winter Olympics held in a capital city. The ski jumping is at Holmenkollen in front of an enormous crowd.

Ekofisk. On 23 December, Phillips Petroleum confirms a major oil find in the Norwegian North Sea. It is among the largest offshore discoveries ever made, and it arrives in a country poor enough to have been sending emigrants to America within living memory.

No to Europe, yes to a state oil company. Norway votes against joining the European Community — and does so again in 1994. The same year Statoil is founded, on the principle set out in parliament’s ten oil commandments that the resource belongs to the nation.

The fund. Parliament establishes what becomes the Government Pension Fund Global. A fiscal rule adopted in 2001 limits the government to spending roughly the fund’s expected real return rather than the capital. It becomes the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world.

A roof you can walk on. The Opera House opens in Bjørvika, by Snøhetta, with a marble roof given to the public. It begins the rebuilding of the entire harbour front on land freed by putting the motorway in a tunnel.

22 July. A Norwegian far-right terrorist bombs the government quarter, killing eight, and then shoots dead sixty-nine people — most of them teenagers — at a Labour youth camp on Utøya. Seventy-seven die. The 22 July Centre is the country’s account of it, and of what it has and has not reckoned with since.

MUNCH, and the ships close. The thirteen-storey Munch museum opens in Bjørvika, on a site the city had voted against in a referendum. In the same year the Viking Ship Museum closes for a rebuild that has since run long and over budget.

The largest art museum in the Nordics. The National Museum opens beside the City Hall, merging four institutions into 54,600 square metres and putting the 1893 Scream on a wall a few minutes from the fjord.