Portal:Denmark

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Welcome to the Denmark Portal!
Velkommen til Danmarksportalen!

Flag Coat of arms
Location of Denmark within Europe

Denmark is the smallest and southernmost of the Nordic countries. Unified in the 10th century, it is also the oldest. Located north of its only land neighbour, Germany, south-west of Sweden, and south of Norway, it is located in northern Europe. From a cultural point of view, Denmark belongs to the family of Scandinavian countries although it is not located on the Scandinavian Peninsula. The national capital is Copenhagen.

Denmark borders both the Baltic and the North Sea. The country consists of a large peninsula, Jutland, which borders Schleswig-Holstein; many islands, most notably Zealand, Funen, Vendsyssel-Thy, Lolland, and Bornholm; and hundreds of minor islands often referred to as the Danish Archipelago. Denmark has historically controlled the approach to the Baltic Sea, and those waters are also known as the Danish straits.

Denmark has been a constitutional monarchy since 1849 and is a parliamentary democracy. It became a member of the European Economic Community (now the European Union) in 1973. The Kingdom of Denmark also encompasses two off-shore territories, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, both of which enjoy wide-ranging home rule. The Danish monarchy is the oldest existing monarchy in Europe, and the national flag is the oldest state flag in continuous use.

Selected biography

Johan Ludvig Heiberg.

Johan Ludvig Heiberg (December 14, 1791 - August 25, 1860), Danish poet and critic, son of the political writer Peter Andreas Heiberg (1758-1841), and of the novelist, afterwards the Baroness Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, was born at Copenhagen.

In 1800 his father was exiled and settled in Paris, where he was employed in the French foreign office, retiring in 1817 with a pension. His political and satirical writings continued to exercise great influence over his fellow-countrymen. Johan Ludvig Heiberg was taken by K.L. Rahbek and his wife into their house, Bakkehuset. He was educated at the university of Copenhagen, and his first publication, entitled The Theatre for Marionettes (1814), included two romantic dramas. This was followed by Christmas Jokes and New Years Tricks (1816), The Initiation of Psyche (1817), and The Prophecy of Tycho Brahe, a satire on the eccentricities of the Romantic writers, especially on the sentimentality of Ingemann. These works attracted attention at a time when Baggesen, Oehlenschläger and Ingemann possessed the popular ear, and were understood at once to be the opening of a great career.

Recently selected: Carl Nielsen - Christian IV of Denmark - Ole Rømer - Karen Blixen


Selected picture

Sorte Brødre Kirke
Sorte Brødre Kirke
Sortebrødre church in Viborg. The church was built in the early 13th century for the Dominican Order as a monastery, but was transformed to a protestant Lutheran church in 1529 during the Danish reformation.

Selected article

Mærsk group container ship Edith Maersk (11.000 TEU/156,907 tons DW) in the Suez Canal
The A. P. Moller-Maersk Group (Danish: A.P. Møller-Mærsk Gruppen) is an international business conglomerate more commonly known simply as Maersk. Maersk has activities in a variety of business sectors, primarily transportation (container shipping fleet) and energy (offshore oil exploration and transportation). It is the largest container ship operator and supply vessel operator in the world.

Maersk is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and has subsidiaries and offices in more than 130 countries worldwide. The group has around 110,000 employees. It stood as number 138 on the Fortune Global 500 list for 2007.

Maersk's activities are organised into four main business segments: Container shipping and related activities; APM Terminals; Tankers, offshore and other shipping activities; Oil and gas activities; Retail acivity; and Shipyards, other industrial companies, interest in Danske Bank, etc.

Selected place

View of The Old Town
The Old Town in Aarhus is an open-air village museum consisting of 75 historical buildings collected from 20 townships in all parts of the country. In 1914 the museum opened for the first time as the worlds’ first open-air museum of its kind and till this day it remains one of just a few top rated Danish museums outside Copenhagen serving some 3.5 million visitors every year.

The museum buildings are organized into a small village of chiefly half-timbered structures originally erected between 1550 and the late 1800s in various parts of the country and later moved to Aarhus during the 1900s. There are several groceries, diners and workshops spread throughout the village with museum staff working in the roles of typical village figures i.e. merchant, blacksmith etc. adding to the illusion of a "living" village.

Categories

Category puzzle
Category puzzle
Select [►] to view subcategories

Denmark topics

Things you can do

TASKS

Geography stubs · People stubs · Denmark stubs in general
Help us extend these stubs and make them real articles!

  • Categorize:

Help us categorize Denmark-related articles

  • WikiProjects:

Have a look at WikiProject Denmark, WikiProject Faroe Islands, WikiProject Greenland and WikiProject Norse history and culture

  • Noticeboard:

Have a look at the Danish Wikipedians' notice board

  • Geotag:

Find coordinates for these locations and tag them: articles missing geocoordinate data

Related portals


Northern Europe


Other countries

Associated WikiMedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject: