"The Road to Zion"

7 May 2005

One hundred and fifty years has passed since the first Icelanders started their ocean voyage west to settle in a new land, or the "promissed land". Most Icelanders associate the western migration period of 1870-1914 as when thousands of their countrymen set off and risked everything to establish homes in America. Most went to Canada. The story related in the exhibit  The Road to Zion begins much earlier in 1850. The destination was Zion or the "promised land".

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often called the Mormon Church, was founded in 1830 in the United States of America, and its missionary work began immediately. In 1850 two Icelanders were baptized in Copenhagan. They returned to their native land of Iceland and served as missionaries. They sucessfully converted some of those on the Westman Islands and South Iceland. The converts were instructed to go to the new Zion in Utah.

The exhibit The Road to Zion tells a small amount of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and traces the journey of Thordur Didriksson on his journey to Zion.  It also tells of the Icelandic community in Spanish Fork, Utah. The exhibit was originally presented at the Emigration Centre at Hofsos, Iceland in 2000. It has been adapted to the Culture House in Reykjavik and opened on 7 May 2005.

Culture House  

A replica of the "Christus" - The Resurrected Christ - by the Icelandic/Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen is beautifully dispalyed as part of this exhibit.  Bertel's father, Gottskálk Þorvaldsson, was a skilled wood carver from the area of Skagafjordur, in Northern Iceland, who married a Danish woman by the name of Karen Grönlund and setted down in Copenhagen where Bertel was born in 1770.   

Contacts for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Iceland: http://liahona.fjarnet.net/hafu-samband/tengiliir.html

Jesus Christ, The Son of God