Want 70 days of uninterrupted summer? Head to Sommarøy from May 18 to July 26. This small island – rounghly translated to Summer Island – is so far north the sun shines bright 24/7 in summer.
Now, the 350 residents of Sommarøy want to break the schackles of time, saying that in summer they want to do ‘what we want, when we want.
In the land of the midnight sun residents are hoping to declare their small Norwegian island the world’s first time-free zone.
“All over the world, people are characterised by stress and depression,” Kjell Ove Hveding, the leader of the campaign on the island, west of Tromsø and inside the Arctic circle, told the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.
Residents believe knowing what time of day it is is unnecessary, and 300 have voted on a proposal to be put forward to authorities, the local broadcaster reports.
“There’s constantly daylight, and we act accordingly,” Hveding said on the campaigns Facebook page.
“In the middle of the night, which city folk might call ‘2 a.m.,’ you can spot children playing soccer, people painting their houses or mowing their lawns, and teens going for a swim,” he went on to say.
With the town reliant on very seasonal industries such as tourism and fishing, tourism officials told NRK they suspected the campaign was mainly a clever ploy to attract more summer visitors. But, a philosophy professor told the broadcaster that it as an intriguing idea.
“It’s a fascinating concept,” said Truls Egil Wyller of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Society had been ruled by the clock “and so disciplined in a very special way” only for the past two centuries, he said.
He said though that residents of Sommarøy would not find life without time particularly easy. “I’m not going to say it’s impossible to pull a whole island out of the global clock,” he told the broadcaster. “But it does sounds very difficult.”
