On your left, look for a boxy, glass-fronted storefront with a pale facade and the museum’s name marking the entrance.
Yes... this is the Icelandic Phallological Museum, and it does exactly what the name suggests. It collects and studies penises. Reykjavík has a gift for treating the unusual with a straight face, and this place may be the city’s most Icelandic example of that talent.
The museum began with one man, Sigurður Hjartarson, a teacher and school principal who spent thirty-seven years collecting specimens. His interest started in childhood, when someone gave him a bull’s penis to use as a cattle whip. That is not the usual origin story for a museum founder, but here we are. In the nineteen seventies, friends began handing him more specimens, then workers at whaling stations joined in, then fishermen, slaughterhouses, and farms across Iceland. By nineteen ninety-seven, Sigurður opened the collection to the public.
If you check your screen for a moment, you can see Sigurður himself: a very calm-looking schoolmaster who somehow became the world’s best-known collector in this particular field.
Inside, the collection stretches from the enormous to the almost invisible. One of its giants is the front tip of a blue whale penis, one hundred and seventy centimeters long and weighing seventy kilograms. At the opposite end sits the baculum of a hamster. A baculum is a penis bone, and this one measures just two millimeters, so small you need a magnifying glass to see it. That range tells you a lot about the museum’s personality: half laboratory, half eyebrow-raising cabinet of curiosities.
And because this is Iceland, folklore gets a seat at the table too. The museum claims to hold penises from elves, trolls, kelpies, and other beings from local legend. You cannot see them, of course, because Icelandic folklore says those creatures are invisible. That joke lands especially well because the museum insists, quite seriously, that it exists to let people study phallology... meaning the study of the penis... in an organized scientific way.
The museum’s most famous quest involved finding a human specimen. In two thousand and eleven, it received its first, donated by a ninety-five-year-old Icelandic man. The preservation did not go as planned. Instead of a dignified display, it became a grayish-brown shriveled mass in a jar of formalin, a preserving liquid. Sigurður admitted the mistake plainly and said he hoped for “a younger and a bigger and better one.” That line, you could say, became part of the legend. If you look at the image on your phone, you can see the display that grew from that long, awkward search.
Since two thousand and twelve, Sigurður’s son, Hjörtur Gísli Sigurðsson, has run the museum here in Reykjavík, insisting it belongs in Iceland. More than seventy thousand visitors come each year, and many leave discovering that the place is less smutty than scientific, less scandal than specimen jar... though it still knows how to wink.
It is one of those rare museums where biology, folklore, and deadpan Icelandic humor all fit on the same shelf.
If you want to go in, it is open every day from ten in the morning until seven in the evening.
When you’re ready, continue on toward the Cabinet of Iceland.
