Some places claim you before you ever arrive. This is a story about one of those places.
I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO TROMSØ
A Photograph in a Library Book. A Friday Afternoon. A Love That Has Lasted Twenty Years.
Some places claim you before you ever arrive. This is a story about one of those places.
In my school, Friday was the best day of the week for one specific reason.
The last period on Friday was library. Not because I was a particularly studious child — I was curious more than studious, which is a different thing entirely — but because Friday library meant the next two days were free, and because the library at the end of a Friday felt like a different kind of space than it did on other days. Quieter. Slower. Like the weekend had already begun inside it.
I would go to the general knowledge section. I had a specific weakness for books about records and extremes — the tallest, the deepest, the coldest, the oldest, the most. There was a book I returned to more than any other. Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash. I must have read it twenty times across different Friday afternoons.
One afternoon I opened it to a photograph I had not noticed before, or had noticed and not fully seen. A city at night, reflected in still black water. Mountains behind it, snow-covered, disappearing into darkness. Above everything — above the mountains, above the city, above the darkness — a curtain of green light moving across the sky in a slow, impossible curve. The kind of light that does not look like it belongs to a world governed by ordinary physics.
The caption said: Tromsø, Norway.
I was a child in Tamil Nadu, 8,000 kilometres from Norway, in a library that smelled of old paper and ceiling fans. And something happened in that moment that I do not have a better word for than claimed. The city in the photograph claimed me. Not the other way around.
I have never been to Tromsø. It has been on my bucket list longer than anything else I can remember wanting. And in the years since that Friday afternoon, I have come to understand something about places that claim you before you arrive — something about what that wanting teaches you, and what it means to love a place you have never stood in.
This is that story.
I. The Place Itself
69 degrees north, above the Arctic Circle
Tromsø sits at 69 degrees north latitude, 350 kilometres above the Arctic Circle, on a small island in the Tromsfjord in northern Norway. It is the largest city in northern Norway — which is to say it is a city of approximately 75,000 people in a landscape where most of the land is owned by mountains, fjords, and the sea.
It is called the Gateway to the Arctic. It has also been called the Paris of the North — a nickname that originated in the nineteenth century when Tromsø was a prosperous trading hub with a lively social scene that surprised visitors who expected bleakness and found instead a city that had learned to make warmth from within because the world outside refused to provide it reliably.
The geography is extraordinary. The city centre sits on the island of Tromsøya, connected to the mainland and the neighbouring island of Kvaløya by bridges. The Tromsø Bridge — 1,016 metres long, curving gracefully over the fjord — is one of the defining images of the city, reflected in water that is simultaneously some of the coldest and clearest in the world.
The mountains that surround the city are not decorative. They are enormous, immediate, present in every direction. From the city centre you look up at them the way you might look up at a sky — they occupy that much of your visual field. In winter they are white. In the brief Arctic summer they turn green so suddenly it appears to happen overnight.
"Tromsø is a city that learned to make warmth from within because the world outside refused to provide it reliably. That is not a geographical fact. That is a philosophy."
II. The Polar Night
When the sun disappears for two months
Between late November and mid-January, the sun does not rise above the horizon in Tromsø. This period is called the Polar Night — Mørketid in Norwegian, which translates more evocatively as the dark time.
For approximately two months, Tromsø receives no direct sunlight. The sky lightens briefly around midday into a deep blue twilight — a quality of light that photographers travel from around the world to capture because it exists nowhere else, at no other time. It is not quite dawn and not quite dusk and not quite night. It is its own thing, specific to these latitudes, lasting for a few hours before the darkness returns.
What is remarkable is not that the darkness exists. It is what the people of Tromsø have built inside it.
The Tromsø International Film Festival happens in January, in the depths of the Polar Night, and is one of the most attended cultural events in northern Norway. The city's restaurant and bar scene is, by multiple accounts, livelier in the dark months than in the bright ones — as if the darkness concentrates social life, presses people toward warmth and company and candlelight in the way that cold weather everywhere has always done, just more intensely, more necessarily.
The Sami people — the indigenous people of the Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia — have lived with the Polar Night for thousands of years. Their relationship to it is not endurance. It is culture. The Polar Night in Sami tradition is a time of storytelling, of the interior life, of the knowledge that passes between people when the external world goes quiet and dark and offers no distraction from each other.
"The Polar Night is not something Tromsø endures. It is something Tromsø has built an entire culture inside of. The darkness did not diminish the city. It defined it."
III. The Northern Lights
Aurora borealis — what the photograph could not explain
The photograph in Russell Ash's book showed me the northern lights. It did not explain them. Nothing two-dimensional fully can.
Aurora borealis — the northern lights — are produced when charged particles from the sun, carried on the solar wind, enter Earth's atmosphere and collide with gas molecules near the magnetic poles. The collisions release energy as light. Different gases produce different colours — oxygen at higher altitudes produces red, oxygen at lower altitudes produces green, nitrogen produces blue and purple. The green curtains that dominate most aurora photographs are oxygen at approximately 100 kilometres altitude.
The lights move. That is the thing the photograph cannot communicate. They do not sit in the sky like a static display. They ripple, fold, accelerate, dissolve, and reform. Sometimes slowly, like silk moving in water. Sometimes with a speed that makes witnesses gasp — a sudden surge of brightness that sweeps across the entire visible sky in seconds.
Tromsø sits directly under the auroral oval — the ring-shaped zone around the magnetic north pole where aurora activity is most frequent and most intense. On a clear night with sufficient solar activity, the lights are visible from the city itself, reflected in the fjord below and the snow above, surrounding you in a way that removes the distinction between sky and landscape.
The northern lights — what the science behind the photograph actually says
The solar cycle peaks approximately every eleven years. The current peak — the most intense aurora activity in nearly two decades — is happening right now, in 2025 and 2026. People who have lived in Tromsø for thirty years are describing displays they have never seen before. The timing, for anyone who has been waiting to go, is not incidental.
IV. The Midnight Sun
The other extreme — when darkness becomes light
Between mid-May and late July, the opposite happens. The sun does not set in Tromsø. For approximately two months, daylight is continuous — the sun dips toward the horizon around midnight but never crosses it, producing a long golden twilight that bleeds directly into dawn without any intervening night.
The Midnight Sun is disorienting in a way the photographs also cannot fully communicate. Your body's internal clock, built on the signal of darkness, receives no instruction to sleep. People describe staying outside at 2am without any sense that it is unusual — the light says afternoon, the clock says deep night, and the body is genuinely confused about which authority to believe.
Tromsø in summer is a different city from Tromsø in winter. The mountains turn green. The fjord reflects a sky that never fully darkens. Hiking trails that were buried under snow in January are accessible and crowded in June. The social energy of the city shifts from interior — restaurants, bars, candlelight — to exterior. The outdoors become habitable with an intensity that feels like compensation for the months of darkness. The city exhales.
"In Tromsø's summer, the sun does not set for two months. Your body's clock receives no instruction to sleep. The light says afternoon. The clock says midnight. The city stays outside."
V. What Tromsø Has That Other Places Don't
The specific quality of a place at the edge of the world
I have read everything I can find about Tromsø. Travel essays, scientific papers about the aurora, histories of the Arctic expeditions that departed from its harbour, accounts of the Sami culture that predates the Norwegian city by thousands of years. I have collected photographs the way some people collect stamps — not for display but for the specific pleasure of having them, of being able to return to them.
What emerges from all of it is not a list of attractions. It is a quality.
Tromsø has the quality of a place that has been tested by its geography and survived not by fighting it but by incorporating it. The Polar Night is not an obstacle — it is a season with its own culture, its own light, its own specific beauty. The cold is not an enemy — it is the condition that makes the warmth inside more warm. The remoteness is not a limitation — it is the reason the city developed its own self-sufficient character, its own way of being, that cities in more accessible places never needed to develop.
Places at the edge of the world tend to develop a density of character that more comfortable places lack. They have had to earn their beauty rather than inherit it. They have had to build their warmth deliberately rather than assume it. Tromsø is that kind of place — and you can feel it in every account of it, in every photograph of it, in every description of the specific silence of a clear Arctic night when the lights are moving overhead and the fjord is black and still below.
"Places at the edge of the world earn their beauty rather than inherit it. They build their warmth deliberately rather than assume it. Tromsø is that kind of place."
VI. From Tamil Nadu to the Arctic Circle
What 8,000 kilometres of distance teaches you about longing
I grew up in Tamil Nadu, where the coldest month barely touches fifteen degrees Celsius and the concept of a sun that refuses to set is as theoretical as the concept of a sun that refuses to rise. The landscape of my childhood is the opposite of Tromsø in almost every measurable way — warm, loud, bright, crowded, coloured in the specific oranges and greens and golds of South India rather than the whites and blues and Arctic greens of Norway.
And yet.
There is a theory in psychology called the contrast effect — the idea that we are most powerfully drawn to what is most different from our own experience. The desert dweller dreams of the ocean. The city person longs for silence. The child raised in perpetual warmth and light opens a library book on a Friday afternoon and cannot look away from a photograph of a city where the sun disappears for two months and the sky fills with impossible green light.
I think there is truth in that theory. But I also think it is incomplete. Because the longing I felt looking at that photograph was not simply the longing for cold, for dark, for different. It was recognition. Something in the quality of Tromsø — its self-sufficiency, its warmth built deliberately against the dark, its culture constructed inside difficulty rather than despite it — felt familiar in a way I could not explain as a child and can only partially explain now.
Tamil Nadu knows something about building warmth and community and colour against difficulty. The festivals that happen in the hottest months, the kolam drawn at dawn before the heat arrives, the filter coffee that begins every morning before anything else is decided — these are also a culture built deliberately, maintained with intention, chosen rather than assumed. The geography is opposite. The philosophy, I think, is the same.
I have never been to Tromsø. But I have always understood it.
"Tamil Nadu and Tromsø are geographical opposites — one of perpetual warmth, one of perpetual Arctic cold. But both built their culture deliberately against their climate rather than despite it. I think that is why a child in a Tamil Nadu library recognised something in a Norwegian photograph."
VII. The Photograph Becomes the Memory
On loving a place before you arrive
There is a philosopher named Alain de Botton who wrote that the anticipation of a place is often more powerful than the place itself — that we project onto destinations all the things we most need, and that the destination, when we arrive, is always both more and less than what we imagined.
I have thought about this in relation to Tromsø for years. I have wondered whether the city I have been carrying in my imagination since that Friday afternoon is better or worse or simply different from the city that actually exists on that island in the Tromsfjord. Whether the green lights in my mind are brighter than any real aurora. Whether the silence I imagine is quieter than any real Arctic night.
I have decided it does not matter. The imagined Tromsø and the real Tromsø are not in competition. They are two different things that will coexist once I finally stand there — the place I carried for twenty years and the place that will replace it, not by being better or worse, but by being real.
What the longing has given me is not a substitute for the experience. It is a preparation for it. Twenty years of reading about the aurora have given me the physics to understand what I am seeing when I finally see it. Twenty years of photographs have given me the visual vocabulary to recognise the specific quality of Arctic light when it falls on me directly. Twenty years of caring about a place have given me the attention to arrive there fully rather than casually.
Some people arrive at destinations. Others are already partially there before the plane lands.
I will go to Tromsø. I do not know exactly when. The solar cycle is at its peak right now — the lights are the most intense they have been in two decades. The timing, if timing means anything, is as good as it has ever been.
When I go, I will bring a camera. I will try to photograph the northern lights the way Russell Ash's book photographed them — the green curtain above the mountains, the reflection in the black water below. I will try to make the photograph that does to someone else what that photograph did to me on a Friday afternoon in a school library in Tamil Nadu.
A child somewhere will open a book. They will see the photograph. Something will happen that has no better word than claimed.
The best thing about time is it changes. And one day — not yet, but one day — the photograph will become the memory.
"Some people arrive at destinations. Others are already partially there before the plane lands. I will go to Tromsø. When I do, I will already know it. That is what twenty years of longing gives you."
— END —
Mystic Quill | Research & Writing by Selva Ganesh K | 2026
mysticquill.blogspot.com
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