It was almost as if new parents Sveinn and Svanhvit divined the future when they named their baby girl Ljósbjörg Petra María when she arrived on Christmas Eve, 1922. The name Petra is derived from the Greek for ‘stone’, and it wasn’t long before the young girl began to reveal her affinity with the natural world.
A childhood in Iceland’s remote eastern fjords was one founded in nature: summertime adventures in the hills, skiing and skating in winter, or afternoons in the Stöävarfiöäu creeks attempting to teach tricks to the trout that swam there. At the age of seven, Petra and her friends were venturing out in search of stones. Some would be collected for drawing, others as vessels to be used in ‘mud-pie’ tea parties, and the most ornamental would be arranged around the gullabú huts – or playhouses – the children constructed across the village.
When Petra was 14, a young lad named Jón Ingimundarson – or Nenni to his friends – moved to the village from two fjords further south. At the time, the sole means of transport was by boat. ‘We noticed each other, like kids do,’ remembered Petra. Friendship burgeoned into young love. When Petra began training to become a nurse in the North, Nenni was taken to Reykjavik for work in the fishing industry. But in time the pair were reunited in the fjords, and eventually they married, on a day long anticipated by the bride and her two siblings, who together realised a dream of celebrating their three weddings together. For Petra and Nenni, four children followed, and as the couple embarked on extending their little house in Stövarfjöräur, so Petra’s stone-collecting fervour grew. Finally she had a home for her accumulated treasures.
In her village, the neighbours’ attitude to Petra’s hobby was quizzical. But she defied expectations that she should take a housewifely role, and was content in what others saw as her eccentricity. Most mornings would bring new ‘hunting’ adventures (as she liked to call them), with children in tow and sandwich picnics; often she returned from the high peaks with as many as 40 kilos of stones on her back. Only when a specimen was too unwieldy for her bag would Petra set it carefully on the mountainside, to be collected by sleigh at the first snowfall.
Nenni was often at sea, but the family was happy, and together would stride out on stone-collecting missions as often as they could. Then one tragic day in 1973, while they were on holiday in Denmark, Nenni had a fatal heart attack. He was aged just 52.
In her loss, Petra sought sanctuary in her stones. At Nenni’s funeral, as friends and family gathered at the house, it occurred to Petra that she might welcome the guests to enjoy her flourishing collection, to share the profound solace and beauty it brought her. By then a new road had opened up on the coast, giving greater access to her home, and in the months that followed, visitors were coming in their droves to marvel at Petra’s treasures, which now filled the small bungalow and festooned the rambling terraces of the garden. Only Petra’s bedroom remained stone-free: a shrine instead to her family, with row upon row of smiling photographs.
Petra died in 2012, aged 90. In her final years, she would delight in visiting the museum from her nearby care home, to sit in the garden and gaze across her stones to the fjord and mountains beyond. To thumb Petra’s guestbook is to encounter a poignant sweep of humanity, from troops of schoolchildren to probing professors; even a German institution for the blind. There are accounts from those moved to tears; others who felt healed by the stones. On one occasion, Petra gave shelter to a group of 12 Italian cyclists caught in a storm – inviting them to eat with her, dry their clothes and stay the night.
Next year, the museum – now tended by Petra’s 12 grandchildren – will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Its collection spans every type of mineral: from long-stranded quartz crystals to tenebrous obsidian; furry mordenite – so fragile its hair-like fibres break when wet – to glassy Icelandic spar, so clear it aided the Vikings’ naval navigation. Yet of all the treasures of gems and minerals Petra encountered, the one she prized most was not on account of its rarity but because of her memories of the day she found it: a beautiful hiking expedition on which she was accompanied by local children. The giant chalcedony quartz was lowered to safety thanks to the determination of fellow villagers equipped with a few hessian sacks and some sturdy ropes.
Petra’s efforts didn’t go unnoticed. In 1995, she gained formal recognition for her work from the president of Iceland, and was invited to dine at the official residence. The characteristically maverick Petra, however, had her reservations: ‘No, thank you,’ she responded. ‘I received this decoration for my stones and not for myself!’ To the delight of all, however, she was eventually persuaded to attend.
Petra was modest about her expertise in natural history, which extended to other fields as well, from shells to forestry – she even travelled to Norway to learn about arboriculture and founded a local tree-planting group. (The spruce trees in Stövarfjöräur – rare among Iceland’s low-growing flora – are testament to her endeavours.) Her staunch independence was unflinching, and despite decades of correspondence with geologists, botanists and marine biologists, she insisted that it was the beauty, not the science, of her collections that was her primary motivation. ‘It was dreadful to be unable to write a song or a poem about all the beautiful things that I have witnessed, to be unable to give something back,’ she lamented. ‘I have seen such beautiful things – incredible beauty that I can’t put into words.’
Certainly words fail to conjure the curiosity of the collection, or the idiosyncrasy of its maker. ‘She was totally fascinated by stones – quite smitten,’ remembers Una, Petra’s oldest grandchild and chief custodian of the museum. In this hushed fishing village of east Iceland, Petra’s force of nature lives on, glistening from every surface and whispering inside every cavity.
Petra’s Stone and Mineral Collection reopens to visitors in May 2024. For opening times, visit steinapetra.is
