Longyearbyen: The city that tried to ban death

The city that tried to ban death… Sounds like the start of a grim fairy tale or perhaps the plot of a Monty Python sketch gone rogue. But Longyearbyen, Norway, went ahead and did just that. Sort of. They didn’t quite outlaw the Grim Reaper, but they did give him a rather frosty reception.

Longyearbyen sits high up in the Svalbard archipelago, around 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole. The kind of place where polar bears outnumber people, where it’s dark for half the year, and where reindeer nonchalantly roam past the local pub. It’s remote, cold, and as it turns out, one of the worst places in the world to die. Not because of any sinister Viking rituals, but because it’s just too cold.

Here’s the icy truth: bodies don’t decompose in Longyearbyen. The permafrost preserves them almost perfectly, like a cryogenic deep-freeze that nobody ordered. Back in 1917, the Spanish flu swept through the town and buried victims remained almost intact decades later. Scientists even worried that the virus might still be viable. So when the locals say, “We don’t do death here,” they mean it quite literally. In fact, since the 1950s, burials have been unofficially but strictly discouraged.

Want to grow old in Longyearbyen? Best not. If you become terminally ill, you’re expected to relocate to mainland Norway. They’ll look after you, sure, but preferably somewhere the ground isn’t holding onto its dead like a morbid freezer drawer.

This has created some wildly surreal scenarios. Imagine a place where you can be born, grow up, go to school, fall in love, maybe even have a few misadventures with snowmobiles and moonshine—but once death taps you on the shoulder, you need to hop on the next plane out. “Sorry, no dying here, airport’s that way.”

Of course, it’s not a legally enforced ban. There’s no Law of Immortality Act in the local statutes. But practicalities trump sentiment here. Cremation, repatriation, and relocation are the norm. Even the tiny cemetery in town hasn’t accepted a new resident in decades. It’s more museum than mausoleum.

Yet people still live there. Around 2,000 hardy souls call Longyearbyen home. They brave -30°C winters and three months of polar night with the kind of stoic good humour that comes from knowing your car might be stolen by a polar bear. Or that your pipes will freeze if you blink too slowly.

Living here means signing up to the rules of a town dictated by the elements. Children aren’t allowed to be born in Longyearbyen either. Pregnant women must head to the mainland weeks before their due date. It’s all very polite, very Nordic, and very surreal.

And yet, the place has charm. It’s stunning. Arctic mountains loom like frozen cathedrals. The Northern Lights make regular appearances like celestial house guests. The community is tight-knit, international, and deeply pragmatic. You don’t end up in Longyearbyen by accident. It’s a chosen exile, a frontier outpost for the cold-loving eccentric, the polar researcher, the mining engineer, the person escaping something or everything.

And while death is technically banished, the awareness of mortality is perhaps sharper here than anywhere else. The fragility of human life is written into the frost, echoed in the silence, underscored by the need to carry a rifle every time you leave town—just in case a curious polar bear decides you look like lunch.

There’s poetry in that, strange as it sounds. A place where death isn’t welcome, but never forgotten. Where survival isn’t taken for granted. And where the dead, encased in permafrost, quietly remind the living to stay warm, stay moving, and perhaps rethink that second glass of aquavit before snowmobiling at midnight.

Longyearbyen is, in many ways, a paradox. It’s a town where life goes on defiantly, almost absurdly, in a place nature never meant for humans to settle. And in that icy resistance, it tells a story far larger than its size: of people making homes on the edge of the world, dancing on the lip of mortality, politely asking death to come back later—preferably somewhere warmer.