Raw beauty and haunting poetry emerge from the idiosyncratic collaboration between Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and the late French-born artist Louise Bourgeois in Vardø, Norway. Here in the country's northeasternmost town (population: 2,000) above the arctic circle, you now find an arresting shrine to 91 people in the area who were tried and burned at the stake in the 17th century for the crime of witchcraft. Centuries later, the Steilneset Memorial for the Victims of the Witch Trials in Vardø officially opened June 23, presided by Her Majesty Queen Sonja of Norway.

The unusual project, sponsored by the town of Vardø, Finnmark County, the Varanger Museum, and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, offers another stop on the much- heralded National Tourist Routes in Norway [Record, October 2007, page 90]. Because the memorial brings belated attention to aberrations of justice that occurred long ago, it may seem just a touristic ploy to attract sightseers to the craggy Steilneset promontory off the barren Varanger peninsula, where reindeer gambol and sheep never seem to sleep ' at least on sunny summer nights. However, as Sturla J. Stalsett, general secretary of the Vardø Church City Mission, pointed out during the opening ceremonies, the memorial is meant to remind us of the ongoing danger of collectively creating scapegoats. If historical circumstances seem peculiar now, the intent behind the work addresses larger moral claims.