If Denmark is a country of islands, then Stockholm, Sweden is a city of islands.  The city of Stockholm is spread across 14 different islands with the exact center actually located in the water and about 1/3 of the city itself consisting of waterways.  In fact, the historical name for the city was Staten mellan broarna or “city between bridges”. Stockholm is the capital and biggest city in Sweden (by population and size) – in fact, it is the largest urban area (by size) in all the Scandinavian countries.  All told, there are about 2 and 1/2 million people living in or around the metropolitan area of Stockholm.  Further, this area is really old – there are artifacts here that show settlement since the Stone Age!  You may also recognize Stockholm as the location of the annual Nobel Prize ceremony.  Naturally, it is the location of the Swedish government, the high court of Sweden, and the official residence of the Swedish royal family and the Prime Minister.  Sweden and Finland have had a lasting relationship throughout history and, interestingly, the largest minority group in Stockholm (those people not Swedish) are Finns making Finnish the second most popular language spoken here.  That said, we are grateful that the third most popular language here is English.

Today was our first full day in Sweden.  We arrived by train in early evening yesterday, did some brief exploration walking around the area and learning the metro system which includes trains, trams (streetcars) and busses, and made some purchases before settling in to our hotel for the night.  Because of the global position of this city and how close we are still to the summer solstice, there are about 17-18 daylight hours in Stockholm.  We had to shut the window blinds in order to actually fall asleep.  In any regard, after a lovely breakfast that included, of all things, Swedish meatballs, pickled herring, and a salad bar(?) as options, we started our museum tour of the city.  I want to point out two important things about this day: 1. It was our first full day of sunshine since we arrived in Europe 16 days ago on June 28 (think about that for a moment), and 2. The museums we visited were all located on the Kungliga Djurgården (Royal Game Park) in Stockholm, which is an island in the center of the city.  

The Vasa museum is a nautical museum with an entire collection of exhibits – displayed on 7 different levels! – from one single massive war ship.  The Vasa is the only whole (well, almost whole) 17th century ship that has ever been salvaged. No other place in the world can you see such a massive salvaged vessel.  She is a 64-cannon warship who sank on her maiden voyage in 1628 and 98% of her is intact and original.  Yes, there are older ships in other museums (the Mary Rose from the 16th Century in the U.K., for example) but none of them are entirely whole (well, almost whole) with 98% of the ORIGINAL remains preserved.  Can you even imagine the amount of work and the cost involved in salvaging this beast in the 1960s?  The Vasa was the largest ship in the Swedish fleet at that time – she weighed 1,200 tons, contained 120 tons of stone ballast and had 10 sails that were 164 feet tall at their highest point!  In addition, King Gustavus Adolphus, who commissioned her, insisted that she be designed by Dutch master ship builders, have TWO gun decks, and hold a massive array of highly visible decoration – including over 500 statues and ornaments created by German sculptors and a high transom for even more lavishness – to demonstrate his greatness and power.  In a nutshell, the young Swedish King was flexing his muscles at his cousin, the King of Poland, and the end result was a huge, expensive ship that needed a wider hull and heavier ballast to counterweight the excess guns and decorations that caused her to be unbalanced.  Because she was so top-heavy, after about 20 minutes and less than one mile at sea, a strong wind came along and knocked her over; causing water to pour into the cannon ports on the lower gun deck and flooding the whole ship.  Fortunately, the people of Stockholm were standing nearby on the shore watching her set sail and they got into fishing boats and saved all but 30 of the people on board.  Interestingly, for her maiden voyage, the sailors AND THEIR FAMILIES were on board so some of the casualties were women and children.  Research of the Vasa remains ongoing and the types of items recovered range from weapons (cannons with various ball designs, muskets, halberds, swords, mullets) to coins and anchors to skeletons. The most impressive thing for us – aside from just the absolute massive size of the Vasa herself – is that she spent 333 years in the Baltic Sea and has so little visible damage.  

Nearby the Vasa is the Viking Museum, which, of course, was our second destination.  We are sticking with a theme here people, remember?  The Viking Museum in Stockholm was both different from and similar to those we visited in Denmark.  It is an interactive museum filled with myths and facts about Vikings – particularly those in Swedish history.  Swedish Vikings were very similar to Danish and Norwegian Vikings.  They carried axes, spears and swords, they wore helmets to protect their faces (not ones with horns, Herr Wagner) and chain mail armor to protect their torso, and they also used round shields with a raised dome in the center to help deflect arrows.  Swedish Vikings appear to have preferred axes – like Thor’s hammer – and spears – like Odin’s Gungnir.  Also, Swedish women were considerably powerful in the Viking era – head of the household, warriors, and seers.  Viking women warriors, like Brynhild, were called Shield Maidens.  At their wedding, Viking wives were presented the keys to the house, the outbuildings and the coffins, and, like English women, they carried them around the waist on a ribbon or chain.  It was an important status symbol at the time.  Slaves, often depicted as being mistreated or abused, were in-fact well cared-for.  Vikings treated their thralls (slaves) quite well because they knew if they treated their workers well, they would work harder. A lesson some modern employers appear to have forgotten.  The Viking Museum provided us with a lot of information about Sigtuna, the original capital of Sweden and where the first Swedish coins were minted, Vals Gärde and Uppsala – however, since we are headed to all three of those places in the coming days, I won’t go into great detail in this post.  We greatly enjoyed the section of the museum that was dedicated to Norse mythology (you will recall it is a favorite of Allita’s) and, although we didn’t learn anything particularly new, we did like reading about the gods and seeing their images depicted by Swedish artists.  

Our next museum to visit was the Vrak or Museum of Wrecks.  The Vrak is a joint effort in maritime exhibitions and collaborative research partnerships with multiple Baltic countries.  It is also a truly immersive, interactive experience.  We spent over an hour there learning more about the science of maritime archaeology than we ever knew existed.  We also learned a lot about a variety of wrecks and salvage operations that occurred and remain ongoing in the Baltic area.  There were VR experiences, hands-on archeological testing, archival research, recorded interviews and recreations, and a huge number of exhibits detailing a variety of shipwrecks throughout history, including the Estonia ferry that sank in 1994 and is the worst peacetime naval disaster since the Titanic in 1912.  There are literally hundreds of sunken vessels in the Baltic area and research remains ongoing on many of them, like the Kronan, a massive ship in the Swedish navy that was mishandled, exploded and then sank killing nearly all 800 sailors on board.  Some, like the Resande Man, were discovered as recently as 2012, and others are still mysteries with their fates unknown and wrecks never located.  Sweden’s Heritage Conservation Act is the world’s oldest law governing the protection of ancient monuments and relics, including those in or under water, and there is a diving ban in all areas where wrecks that have unique cultural heritage value exist.  That said, there are plenty of places to scuba dive in Swedish waters, but there are also a lot of places that are banned – centuries of cultural heritage remain undiscovered and unexplored at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.  

We had a picnic lunch of nutella sandwiches at the marina overlooking a bay full of sailboats and surrounded by children eating gelato and playing in the sunshine.  We wrapped up our day on the island of museums with a walk through the Skogskyrkogården (Woodland cemetery) next door to the massive and gorgeous Nordiska Museet (Nordic Museum).  We rode the Djurgårdslinjen (old, historical streetcar – our tram #24 was built in 1904) back to Normalmstorg and caught the T7, newer tram (street car) to the central station and then walked back to our hotel from there.  

Did you know that prior to 1967, Swedish traffic drove on the left-hand side of the street – like the U.K. currently does?  The street cars (trams) were all taken out of service after that date, Högertrafikomläggningen, which honest-to-God actually means “right-hand traffic reorganization” and is remembered as the biggest logistical event in Swedish history.  Think about it – they had to move bus stops, deal with one-way streets, change the side of their cars where the steering wheel was located, learn how to make right turns without head-on collisions, change all the trams (street cars) and their tracks, change how vehicle headlights were angled, repaint the streets especially at intersections, replace or retrofit the busses (because the doors didn’t open on the correct side!), and they had to STOP TRAFFIC to do it.  It went something like this, “Ok everyone.  Tomorrow you aren’t allowed to drive between 1pm and 6pm.  If you are essential traffic and must be driving (emergencies, etc.), then at 4pm, you have to pull off the road and switch to the right hand side.”  Allita and I have gleefully enjoyed mentally recreating this logistical nightmare most of the day and we giggled even harder when we learned that the Swedish never fully changed their train system, so most of their trains still run on the left-hand side.  Tomorrow, we will ride the Stockholm metro – the only metro in Sweden – which hosts over 100 stations and 90 of those contain some formal artwork (sculptures, mosaics, paintings, engravings, etc.) and is considered the “world’s longest art gallery” (according to the Swedish, naturally).  We will meet our 3-hour WALKING tour of Stockholm at the Opera House.  If I survive the experience, I will tell you all about it.