Qualla: Tåsinge

Tåsinge: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nech Neum, CC BY-SA 3.0. The smith of Troense owned a small patch of land beside his house, and liked to tell people that he and the Baron owned the entire island. It was a joke with a hard edge. From the seventeenth century until 1919, the barons of Valdemars Slot held nearly every acre of Tåsinge, and nearly everyone who worked that ground did so as their tenant. The baron was landlord, employer and — through the island's own birkeret — the court that judged you. Seventy square kilometres of orchard, hedgerow and low green hill just south of Svendborg belonged, in effect, to one family.

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Image: Nech Neum | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tåsinge: Me and the Baron

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jopsens, CC BY-SA 3.0. Admiral Niels Juel received Valdemars Slot and its Tåsinge lands in 1678, payment for the Swedish ships he had taken at the Battle of Køge Bay the year before. The house was already odd by then: Christian IV had commissioned it between 1639 and 1644, to a design by Hans van Steen...

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Image: Jopsens | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tåsinge: Built by Men Who Went to Sea

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kåre Thor Olsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Troense sits almost directly opposite Svendborg, looking north across the sound at the town and west at Valdemars Slot. Its half-timbered houses are generously proportioned for a village of tenants, and they were not built by tenants. Sea captains and sailors raised them during t...

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Image: Kåre Thor Olsen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tåsinge: July 1889

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erik Christensen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hedvig Antoinette Isabella Eleonore Jensen was twenty-one. She performed as Elvira Madigan — slack rope, trick riding, juggling, dancing — and in July 1889 she was staying in Troense with Sixten Sparre, a thirty-four-year-old Swedish cavalry lieutenant who was married. On 18 July...

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Image: Erik Christensen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tåsinge: Twenty-Eight Islands, If You Believe It

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hubertus45, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bregninge Bakke is the island's high ground at around seventy metres, which on Tåsinge counts as a mountain. Bregninge Kirke stands on top, and from its tower on a clear day the South Funen Archipelago opens out in every direction — twenty-eight islands, sixty-five churches and t...

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Image: Hubertus45 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tåsinge: Tøsinger

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kåre Thor Olsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Some 6,100 people live here, and they call themselves Tøsinger. The tåsingsk dialect survives, though thinner than it was. Danish national road 9 runs straight across the island, because since the 1960s Tåsinge has been a link in a chain rather than a destination at the end of a ...

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Image: Kåre Thor Olsen | CC BY-SA 3.0