Who is the greatest person from your country?

[Oyvoyvoyv]

Hmm... Tough one. Almost all Norwegians who currently live are idiots (I'm not kidding - I don't know why, but almost all englishmen are more interesting to talk to.

 

But enough with insulting Norwegians (I can do that later).

 

I feel the answer is pretty obvious (heh... I starter with saying tough one. That's odd).

 

Fritjof Nansen.

 

No it's not because we was the first person to cross greenland on skies, or because of his arctic explorations.

 

A partial reason is that he ensured prince Carl of Denmark (later called King Haakon the 7th) to become king of Norway after the union (that's what it's called - but really, they owned us) when Sweden was dissolved. This prevented any fights for the throne, which would have had a pretty high chance of causing large problems.

 

More importantly, he made "Nansen passports". This was a way to get refugees and war prisoners back to their countries after WWI. He managed to get over 450,000 people back to their homes.

 

During the Russian Famine in 1921, over 5 million people died.  If it wasn't for Nansen, it could easily have been over 10 million. The russian famine happened due to the Russian revolution in 1917, and the fact that Russia with their "community owned farms" killed Ukraina's crops (at the time, Ukraina had the by far biggest crops in Europe, and could alone supply several countries... After the community owned farms kicked in, they had problems supplying themselves).

There's very few records of how Nansen managed to get the fundings to feed 7-15 million Russians, but he somehow did (as you see by the 7-15 million, it is also unknown how many he really helped. But still, 7 million is a lot, and Nansen has a lot of credit for that.

 

 

What is a bit interesting - Quisling (Quisling is considered the biggest traitor in Norway's history) aided Nansen in most of this. He did lots of fantastic actions together with Nansen, but for some reason they're ignored. Just because he sold out Norway to Germany, history books just ruled out all the good stuff he did. That's a shame.