Stockholm
With autumnal mist quickly clearing to reveal clear blue skies, our morning excursion took us to the celebrated Vasa Museum. We had been prepared for the visit in a recap the previous evening but the on screen photography – which so often seems to improve on the real thing – did not prepare us for the impact made by seeing the Vasa ship for the first time when entering the museum. The ship is a metaphor for a particular period in Sweden’s history.
Under the Vasa dynasty, the country had embraced both Protestantism and hereditary monarchy aspiring to great power status. King Gustavus Adolphus championed the Protestant cause in continental Europe clashing with the Poles and the Austrians on distant battlefields. He wanted a flagship that would impress the world and fatally interfered with the design of a vessel by insisting on an additional gun deck that made the ship top heavy on its maiden voyage. On 10 August 1628, the vessel sank in Stockholm harbour, capsized following a sudden gust of wind. After 333 years in the silt she was discovered and salvaged, rising triumphantly from her watery grave in 1961. The history of her conservation has been equally exciting. The ship was pieced together again like a gigantic jigsaw and the wood preserved using polyethylene glycol. In 2000, it was discovered that the preserved wood was exuding sulfur and further remedial work has had to be undertaken. The displays are extraordinary in both their grandeur and detail; the onboard carpenters’ workshop, for example, has a complete set of early seventeenth century tools, all perfectly preserved.
More conservation was on offer in our optional afternoon excursion to Skansen, the world’s first open air museum, founded in 1891 by Artur Hazelius. Sweden only industrialized in the late nineteenth century, but so rapid was the transformation that some individuals became concerned that the traditional vernacular architecture of the country and its associated folkways might disappear. And there is more to the folk museum movement: for countries that no longer think of themselves as military powers – Sweden was neutral, albeit profitably so, during the two world wars - social history of this kind becomes an alternative way of telling the national story. Skansen has been a great success for over a century with festivities taking place at the major holidays – Midsummer, Christmas, New Year and, of course, Walpurgis night. We toured the ancient farmsteads, looked at traditional breed of farm animals, and savored the late afternoon sunlight in the well maintained cottage gardens.
Other activities during the day had included a morning visit to the Art Nouveau City Hall and an optional walking tour in the afternoon of the historic old town, Gamla Stan, where there was a chance to view Berndt Notke’s St George and the Dragon (1494) in the city’s cathedral church, Storkyrkan. The Alfred Nobel Museum had a special exhibition featuring president Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement. Links were thus established with previous ports of call on this Baltic itinerary, Lübeck and Gdansk respectively.
