Look to your left at the grand facade of Borchs Kollegium. If you glance at your screen, you can see a close-up of the impressive entrance portal we are standing in front of right now. Ole Borch officially founded this institution as the Collegium Mediceum on the twenty-ninth of May, sixteen ninety-one. He established it to house exactly sixteen students who were poor, pious, and highly educated. A somewhat demanding checklist.
The brick building you are looking at is actually version three point zero. The seventeen twenty-eight fire that consumed the city reduced the original structure, complete with a chemistry lab and massive library, to ash. The college rebuilt it three years later at a cost of fifty-five hundred rigsdaler... a small fortune translating to a few million dollars today. And then it burned down again. During the eighteen oh seven British bombardment, the students here actually took up arms and fought the landing troops. Despite their bravery, British artillery pummeled the area, and the college went up in flames on the fourth of September.
Architect Peder Malling finally designed the fire-resistant survivor standing before you, and the university inaugurated it in May eighteen twenty-five. Spanning nearly a century and a half, this comparison reveals how the historic Borchs Kollegium has proudly stood the test of time along Store Kannikestraede since its reconstruction.
It has housed some serious heavyweights. Ludvig Holberg, a famous Scandinavian writer, served as the efor... essentially the college warden... in the mid-eighteenth century. The college also hosted alumnus number seven oh three, the historian Jens Paludan-Müller. He died in battle during the Second Schleswig War on the sixth of February, eighteen sixty-four. His memorial stone sits out back, bearing a poetic command: inward, forward, upward. Even modern politicians like Margrete Auken lived right in the porter's lodge in nineteen seventy-one.
This institution has an undeniable knack for endurance. Take a moment to admire the sturdy brickwork, and whenever you are ready, we will head to our next stop.
