Norway: Nearly eleven years after the massacre, there is a memorial to those killed by Breivik.

Norway on Saturday unveiled a memorial to the victims of the 2011 attacks by militant Anders Behring Breivik: 77 bronze columns representing each person killed in his attack. Survivors, relatives of the victims, Prime Minister Jonas Kar Store and Norwegian Crown Prince Hagon attended the ceremony, almost eleven years after the country’s worst attack in peacetime.

“As a nation, we need a place of remembrance. A place to remember all those we lost forever. A place where our children and grandchildren can learn what happened and the consequences of extremism and hatred,” he said.

On July 22, 2011, far-right Norway first detonated a bomb near government headquarters in Oslo, killing eight people and then 69, mostly young people, during a shooting at a camp labor youth summer camp on the island of Utøya. It is about 40 km northwest of the capital.

Located near the port of Utah by passenger boat, the monument is shaped like a staircase with a large arch below the sea. At the base of the stairs are 77 bronze columns, 77 in memory of the dead. Two attacks.

The first curve to see where the sun was when the bomb exploded in Oslo. The second depends on where the sun was at the time of the killings in Utøya.

Many residents living near Utøya challenged the monument project in court, wanting to relocate it. Plaintiffs, some of whom were involved in the rescue effort on the day of the massacre, believed it was a risk to recover painful memories. In February 2021, a Norwegian court rejected the request.

Anders Behring Breivik, now 43, was sentenced in 2012 to 21 years in prison. In January 2022, he demanded his release after serving a minimum of ten years in prison, but in February a court rejected his request, citing the fact that he posed even more danger to society.