Friday July 5 – Stockholm Sweden

A word to sum up Stockholm would be freedom.  Here, you can wander into any public building, even the palace where the King works and not have to have your bags checked or go through a screening process.  The Swedes have what they call, ”All man’s rights”.  They are free to camp anywhere as long as they leave the place spotless.  Because most people in Stockholm live in apartments they can picnic even in the palace grounds, or the graveyards.  We did not see anyone picnicking today because it was a freezing summer day with a cold wind and even rain for a couple of hours.

Besides walking through the old town of Gamla Stan, which is one of the best preserved medieval city centres, we visited the City Hall, The Royal Palace and Armoury and the Vasa Museum.

City Hall was built in 1923 but the bricks were distressed to make it seem older.  It is here each December that the winners of the Nobel prize for that year receive their awards and have a special dinner.  Each winner can invite 14 guests for dinner but has to pay for them.  I suppose this does not make too much of a dent in their ten million dollar prize money.  Evidently, 1350 people can be seated in the main hall for this dinner. Parts of the building are baroque in style and the ceiling in the central room is built to look like a ship made of wood, only it is painted concrete.  In the Golden Hall, the walls are covered with Byzantine type art.  Sweden was very poor when they were building the City Hall and the Palace, so there is an absence of marble and gold as seen in St. Petersburg.  Instead, pillars are painted to look like marble in the palace and some porcelain looking structures are actually papier mache.

All the materials used in the city hall are local but there are influences from several other European cities, such as Italian type piazzas.  By the way, the mayor of this city is female and the bishop of Stockholm is female and lesbian, being actually married to a woman.

Once home to the King of Sweden, The Royal Palace is one of the largest palaces in Europe with over 600 rooms and several museums, including clothes, horse carriages, etc, which belonged to different royalties over the centuries.  This palace is now a working palace. 

After Napoleon liberated Sweden from Denmark he was asked to be their King.  He declined but suggested that one of his generals would make a good king.  So, John Baptist Bernadotte became king of Sweden and changed his name to Gustav the first.  His French wife did not like the food or the way of life in Sweden so she returned to France but left her son with his father to learn the ways of court.  He later became Gustav the second.  John Baptist did not like the food in Sweden either.  Too much fish.  So he instructed the chef to have a boiled egg for him at each meal so that he could eat this if he preferred it to what was on offer.  To this day, at all official banquets, an egg cup is placed for each person.  Sweden is a mixture of the ultra modern and the traditional.

At first the power was in the hands of the nobles, but Gustav the third, took this power from them.  They hated him for this and killed him at a masquerade ball.  Verdi’s opera, The Masked Ball, commemorates this event.

Gamla Stan has cobblestoned streets and  buildings from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The red buildings are from the seventeenth century, the yellow ones are from the seventeen hundreds and the green buildings were built in the nineteenth century.  Some houses have a medallion depicting a phoenix bird rising out of the ashes.  This represents the wooden houses that had insurance against fire.

The Vasa museum was built to house the boat called the Vasa which sank 20 minutes into its maiden voyage in the middle of Stockholm in 1628.  It was discovered buried in the mud of the river only in the nineteen sixties.  It was in good condition because wood worm does not cause damage when wood is in brackish water.  The ship had a double gun deck and is enormous.  It had fierce painted shapes of people and animals on the front to scare the people they were going to fight.  Evidently, in this superstitious age, people could be scared off by evil images. Some items found in the ship included instruments of war, crockery and coins.  All of these are on display in the museum. One hour here was not enough. This spectacular museum needed at least half a day.

A few little stories about the Swedes.  Last year National service was re-introduced for all Swedes when they turn eighteen.  Evidently it is compulsory in a Swedish way.  A letter is sent to people when they turn eighteen asking them if they want to do this service very much, a little or not at all.  After they reply they are then informed how they will do it.   Evidently, in the middle ages, the Swedes hanged men in the public square, but not the women because in those days people did not wear underwear.  For this reason another method had to be found for women.  They used to bury them alive. 

Sweden is made up of 30,000 islands so the sail away was quite spectacular.  It took five hours to pass all the islands with their beautiful houses and boats. It is a stunningly beautiful country with many forests and lakes.