Sisimiut
Sisimiut, formerly Holsteinsborg, is the capital and largest city of the Qeqqata municipality, and the second-largest city in Greenland.
It is located in central-western Greenland, on the coast of Davis Strait, approximately 320 km north of Nuuk.
Although now a place-name, Sisimiut literally means "the people at the fox burrows". The site has been inhabited for the last 4,500 years, first by the Inuit peoples of the Saqqaq culture, Dorset culture, and then the Thule people, whose descendants form the majority of the current population. Artifacts from the early settlement era can be found throughout the region, favored in the past for its plentiful fauna, particularly the marine mammals providing subsistence for the early hunting societies. The population of modern Greenlanders in Sisimiut is a mix of the Inuit and Danish peoples, who first settled in the area in the 1720s, under the leadership of the Danish missionary, Hans Egede.
Today, Sisimiut is the largest business center north of the national capital of Nuuk and is one of the fastest growing cities in Greenland. Fishing is the principal industry in Sisimiut, although the town has a growing industrial base. KNI and its subsidiary Pilersuisoq, a state-owned chain of all-purpose general stores in Greenland, have their base in Sisimiut. Architecturally, Sisimiut is a mix of traditional, single-family houses, and communal housing, with apartment blocks raised in the 1960s during a period of town expansion in Greenland. Sisimiut is still expanding, with the area north of the port, on the shore of the small Kangerluarsunnguaq Bay reserved for a modern suburb-style housing slated for construction in the 2010s. Several professional and general schools are based in Sisimiut, providing education to the inhabitants of the city and to those from smaller settlements in the region. The new Taseralik Culture Center is the second cultural center to be established in Greenland, after Katuaq in Nuuk.
The city has its own bus line, and is the northernmost year-round ice-free port in the country, a shipping base for western and northwestern Greenland. Supply ships head from the commercial port towards smaller settlements in more remote regions of Uummannaq Fjord, Upernavik Archipelago, and as far as Qaanaaq in northern Greenland. The town airport is served by Air Greenland, providing connections to other towns on the western coast of Greenland, and through Kangerlussuaq Airport, to Europe.
Sisimiut has been a settlement site for around 4,500 years, with the people of the Saqqaq culture arriving from Arctic Canada during the first wave of immigration, occupying numerous sites on the coast of western Greenland. At that time, the shoreline was up to several dozen meters above the present line, gradually decreasing in time due to post-glacial rebound. The Saqqaq remained in western Greenland for nearly two millennia. Unlike the following waves of migrants in the millennium following their disappearance, the Saqqaq left behind a substantial number of artifacts, with plentiful archeological finds on the coast of Davis Strait, from Disko Bay in the north—to the coast of Labrador Sea near Nuuk in the south. has uncovered the changing settlement pattern, exhibiting transition from the single-family dwellings to tiny villages of several families. The types of dwelling varied from tent rings made of the hides of hunted mammals, to stone hearths, with no evidence of communal living in larger structures. In contrast, there is evidence for reindeer hunting as a coordinated effort of either villagers or groups of more loosely related individuals, with gathering places in proximity of the hunting grounds being found. Despite recent advances in DNA research based on hair samples from the ancient Saqqaq migrants (which gives insight into their origin), the reason for the decline and subsequent disappearance of the culture are not yet known.
After several hundred years of no permanent habitation, the second wave of migration arrived from Canada, bringing the Dorset people to western Greenland. The first wave of immigrants, known as Dorset I, arrived around 500 BCE, inhabiting the region for the next 700 years. The early Dorset people were followed later by the Dorset II people, although no artifacts have been discovered from the later era around Sisimiut, and few artifacts from the era of Dorset I have been uncovered in archaeological sites, with the finds often limited to harpoon heads and numerous animal bones. The largest number of Dorset culture artifacts can be found further north in the Disko Bay region, while the further to the south, the poorer the finds, disappearing completely on the coast of Labrador Sea in southwestern Greenland.
The Inuit of the Thule culture—whose descendants form the majority of the current population—arrived nearly a thousand years ago, with the first arrivals dated to approximately 13th and 14th century. The Thule people were more technologically advanced than their Dorset predecessors, although they still relied on subsistence hunting, with walruses, reindeer, and particularly the fur seals constituting the base of the economy in the early period.
The shoreline was still at a higher altitude than today, with the Sisimiut valley east of the Kangerluarsunnguaq Bay, partially under sea. Many artifacts and graves from the several centuries of permanent settlement remain scattered in the region. Rich in fauna, the coastal region from Sisimiut to Kangaamiut was particularly attractive for migrants, and due to a large number of historical artifacts it is currently listed as a candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage Site, with the application received in 2003.
There are no signs of Norse settlement in the region. At the time of Hans Egede's establishment of the first Danish colonies, Dutch whalers dominated the area and swiftly burnt down his Bergen Company whaling station on Nipisat Island, approximately 30 km (19 mi) to the north of the present-day town. It was not until Jacob Severin was granted a full monopoly on the Greenlandic trade and permitted to act as an agent of the Danish navy that the Dutch were finally removed in a series of battles in 1738 and 1739.
The present town was established in 1764 by the General Trade Company as the trading post of Holsteinsborg ("Fort Holstein"), named for the first chairman of the Danish College of Missions in Copenhagen which underwrote and directed the missionary work in the colony. At the time of its founding, the Kalaallisut name of the place was Amerlok, after its fjord. The colonists formally established several villages in the region, of which only two remain to this day: Itilleq and Sarfannguit. Under the Royal Greenland Trading Department, Holsteinsborg was a center of the trade in reindeer skins.
Several 18th-century buildings still stand in Sisimiut, among them the 1725 Gammelhuset ("Old House") and the 1775 Bethel-kirken ("Bethel Church") or Blå Kirke ("Blue Church"), the oldest surviving church in Greenland. The buildings were moved from the former site of the settlement at Ukiivik (Holsteinsborg) together with the rest of the settlement. The new church on the rocky pedestal was built in 1926, further extended in 1984. The entrance to the yard with the old church and other protected historical buildings is decorated with a unique gate made of whale jawbone. In 1801, a smallpox epidemic decimated the population of Sisimiut and other coastal settlements, although the population growth quickly resumed due to plentiful marine life on the coast.
The 20th century saw industrialization, through the construction of a shipping port, and a fish processing factory of Royal Greenland in 1924, the first such factory in Greenland. Fishing remains the primary occupation of Sisimiut inhabitants, with the town becoming the leading center of shrimping and shrimp processing. Until 2008 Sisimiut had been the administrative center of Sisimiut Municipality, which was then incorporated into the new Qeqqata Municipality on 1 January 2009, with Sisimiut retaining its status as the administrative center of the new unit, consisting also of the former Maniitsoq Municipality and the previously unincorporated area of Kangerlussuaq. The municipal council, seated in the town hall and headed by Mayor Hermann Berthelsen, consists of 13 members, including the mayor and his deputies, and representatives of the four primary political parties of Greenland: Siumut, Atassut, Democrats and Inuit Ataqatigiit.
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