Our dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,
Please accept our most humble obeisances. All glories to Śrī Guru and Śrī Gaurāṅga.
The year 2026 is a great festival for Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas. It’s the sixtieth anniversary of Your Divine Grace establishing the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Over these last sixty years, a great flood of devotion to Kṛṣṇa has inundated the entire world. Every small corner of the planet has been affected. A testimony to this fact is the endeavors of the servants of your servants in Norway. Although the country of Norway did not receive the fortune of your physical presence, your devoted followers traveled here in the seventies to spread the mission of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu. According to all accounts, they were very successful, and the seed of bhakti was planted in the heart of the nation. Then, in the early eighties, a devotee couple turned their home into a temple and thereby started the first center for Kṛṣṇa consciousness in Bergen, a city on the weather-torn west coast. After some years, a flourishing community of devotees moved their efforts to the capital, Oslo, and through the years Oslo has been the heartbeat of ISKCON Norway.
Today, a new generation of devotees still sustain themselves on this great heritage. For the twentieth year in a row, we will be celebrating the Ratha-yātrā chariot festival. Furthermore, the vibration of the holy names of Kṛṣṇa continue to linger in the air after the local devotees celebrated their annual festival, Scandinama, where they take the chanting of Hare Kṛṣṇa into the streets of the capital during the national celebration of the constitution.
A team of inspired householders, together with a growing congregation, maintain a small center in Oslo, where Śrī Śrī Jagannātha, Baladeva, and Subhadrā reside, and here your Sunday love feast programs, together with Saturday night kirtans and morning readings of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, are attended weekly by a happy crowd of locals. More recently, in the 2020s, a handful of brahmacārīs returned to Bergen to reclaim the west coast in your honor, and they have now opened a beautiful temple in a scenic part of that city, where curious Bergensians and aspiring devotees now regularly visit to receive the mercy of Śrī Śrī Nitāi-Gauracandra.
Our dear Śrīla Prabhupāda, it is our hope that you will somehow be pleased with our efforts here in Norway. Your books are being distributed, and we know that this particular service is very dear to you. Following your order, the Śrīmad Bhagavad-gītā is now translated into Norwegian, and the reigning monarch, King Harald, has even received a copy with appreciation.
Our dear Śrīla Prabhupāda, we beg you to please bless our tiny endeavors so that we might be made able to continue spreading the saṅkīrtana movement of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu here in Norway. You have so kindly given us this ISKCON society, and this small branch in this faraway Arctic Circle land is flourishing by your grace. Our only desire is to make your books and teachings more and more appealing to the local Norwegians. Please be kind and grace us with your mercy to continue this great task.
The servants of your servants at the Norwegian yātrās, offering obeisances at your lotus feet