Nuuk steeple is a prominent site on the landscape. The church received the status of Nuuk Cathedral in 1994 when the first bishop was Kristian Mørk, followed in 1995 by Sofie Petersen, a native of Greenland and the second woman in Denmark to become a bishop. The Herrnhut House was the centre of the Moravian mission of New Herrnhut. Other landmarks include the Hans Egede Church and the Statue of Hans Egede. Greenland National Museum is in Nuuk and was one of the first museums established in Greenland, inaugurated in the mid-1960s. The museum has many artifacts and exhibits related to
Nuuk occupied by the Dorset culture around the former settlement of Kangeq but they disappeared from the Nuuk district before AD 1000. The Nuuk area was later inhabited by Viking explorers in the 10th century (Western Settlement), and shortly thereafter by Inuit peoples. Inuit and Norsemen both lived with little interaction in this area from about 1000 until the disappearance of the Norse settlement for uncertain reasons during the 15th century. The city proper was founded as the fort of Godt-Haab in 1728 by the royal governor Claus Paarss, when he relocated the missionary and merchant Hans Egede's earlier Hope Colony