Mark’s birthday could hardly have begun better. We were enormously fortunate to spend the day exploring Stockholm with Migo Goldberg, a qualified official guide but, much more importantly for us, an old Scouting friend.We first met Migo at the World Scout Jamboree in 2007, when he was leading the Swedish team doing its reconnaissance for the 2011 Jamboree in Sweden. Nearly twenty years later, he had very kindly offered to spend the day showing us his city. As birthday presents go, this was going to be hard to beat.
We met at Mariatorget on Södermalm, where we were also joined by Kirstin, beside the rather dramatic fountain sculpture Tors fiske, or Thor’s Fishing. Created by Anders Wissler in 1903, it depicts Thor having hooked the Midgard Serpent and preparing to dispatch it with Mjölnir. Migo explained how it belonged to a period when Swedes were enthusiastically romanticising their Norse and Viking past, finding heroic links between modern Sweden and its ancient mythology. Thor is very muscular, the serpent looks distinctly unhappy about the whole arrangement, and the overall effect makes our British habit of putting Victorian worthies on plinths look rather tame.
From there Migo led us up the steep, cobbled Blecktornsgränd towards Mariaberget. He explained the rather lovely local association with cats, including the idea of the ridge resembling the arched back of a cat, before we emerged onto Monteliusvägen and a view that immediately helps you understand Stockholm: water, islands, church spires and rooftops spread out below us.
That set the pattern for the day. Migo didn’t simply reel off dates and kings. He gave us just the right amount of history, mixed with architecture, modern politics, social history and the snippets of context that turn a collection of attractive buildings into an understandable city. We learned an enormous amount without ever feeling that we were being taught.
We made our way down towards Slussen, the huge and still evolving redevelopment where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea, and the area where the new Nobel Center is to be built. An elevator whisked us upwards again to another spectacular vantage point, giving us a completely different view across the water towards Gamla Stan, before we descended again and crossed the lock between lake and sea into the old town.
Gamla Stan is the Stockholm everyone recognises: narrow streets, ochre and terracotta buildings, cobbles, churches and alleyways. Eventually we reached Stortorget, its main square and one of the prettiest spots in the city. It also has a considerably less pretty history.In November 1520 it became the setting for the Stockholm Bloodbath, when scores of Swedish nobles, clergy and leading citizens were executed following the coronation of the Danish King Christian II. The intention was to crush opposition to Danish rule; instead, the killings helped provoke the rebellion which brought Gustav Vasa to power and ultimately saw Sweden leave the Kalmar Union. Migo told the story extremely well, although I suspect 12-year-old Harald, Göran and Anna’s son, might have delivered this particular episode with even greater enthusiasm. He is an excellent devotee of blood, gore and historical unpleasantness, and this was very much his sort of material.
Fortunately, fika followed. Migo led us into a café on the square which looked busy enough inside, but tucked away behind it was a secret and completely deserted terrace. Having a Stockholm guide who knows where both the bloodiest stories and the hidden cake are kept is clearly a considerable advantage.
From there we walked towards the Royal Palace, through its courtyards and into the crowds gathering for the Changing of the Guard. We had accidentally encountered the beginning of the ceremony yesterday as the Guard formed up in the city; today we saw the other end of the story at the Palace. Between the two days we had, entirely unintentionally, assembled our own two-part Changing of the Guard experience.
One of the things that struck us throughout the day was the amount of beautiful public art almost littered around Stockholm. Not just grand kings and warriors, but sculptures and installations which appear in squares, courtyards and unexpected corners. Perhaps the most delightful was hidden behind the Finnish Church, where we found Järnpojken, the Iron Boy, officially Pojke som tittar på månen – the Boy Looking at the Moon. At only about 15 centimetres high, he is tiny, sitting curled up and gazing skywards. Sculptor Liss Eriksson based him on a childhood memory of sitting awake at night and looking out at the moon. Visitors rub his head for luck and, in winter, apparently provide him with suitably miniature hats and scarves. After Thor wrestling a giant serpent and kings on horseback, I rather liked the fact that one of Stockholm’s best-loved pieces of public art is a small boy quietly looking upwards.
Then it was back down to the waterfront. In a city built on islands, public transport inevitably includes boats, so we took the ferry across to Djurgården, arriving back at Wasahamnen and the part of Stockholm we had explored yesterday. We walked along the waterfront, past the Museum of Spirits, towards what became one of the absolute highlights of our time in Stockholm: Vasamuseet.
The story of the Vasa is almost too extraordinary to be true. In 1628 Sweden was becoming a major European power and King Gustav II Adolf wanted a warship that demonstrated it. Vasa was enormous, lavishly decorated and heavily armed, carrying 64 guns. She was intended both as a formidable weapon and a very visible advertisement for Swedish royal power.Unfortunately, she had one fairly fundamental design flaw. She wasn’t terribly good at floating.
On 10 August 1628, Vasa set off on her maiden voyage from Stockholm. She had travelled little more than a kilometre when a gust of wind caused her to heel over. Water poured through the open gunports and, in full view of crowds watching from the shore, one of the most impressive warships Sweden had ever built sank to the bottom of Stockholm harbour.And there she remained for more than three centuries.
The conditions in Stockholm harbour helped preserve her remarkably well. Vasa was rediscovered in the 1950s and, after an extraordinary feat of engineering, raised from the seabed in 1961, 333 years after she sank. Today an astonishing 98 per cent of the ship is original.
Nothing really prepares you for seeing her. You enter the darkened museum and there, towering above you, is an almost intact seventeenth-century warship. The elaborate carvings survive in extraordinary detail: lions, warriors, gods, kings and fantastical creatures covering a vessel intended to impress and intimidate anyone who saw her. Today the ship is predominantly dark brown, but many of those carvings were originally vividly painted. Subtle she was not.
The museum is brilliantly arranged so that you gradually climb through several levels around the ship, seeing her from the keel almost to the upper deck. Along the way you learn about the people who sailed aboard her, why she sank, how she was found and raised, and the immense conservation challenge of keeping hundreds of tonnes of seventeenth-century timber intact once it had been brought out of the water.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that Vasa survives precisely because she was such a spectacular failure. Had she enjoyed a long and successful naval career, she would almost certainly eventually have been destroyed, dismantled or simply rotted away. Instead, a disastrous maiden voyage preserved her to become one of Sweden’s greatest historical treasures. We could have stayed considerably longer.
Migo was still very much with us as we left Djurgården and began making our way towards Göran and Anna’s flat. On the way we passed one final piece of public art, although this was of a very different kind and stopped us in our tracks: the memorial landscape around Raoul Wallenbergs torg.
Part of it is Vägen, “The Way”, a symbolic path connecting the square with Stockholm’s Holocaust memorial beside the Great Synagogue. The path incorporates cobblestones from the former Budapest ghetto and railway rails, while a large stone globe bears words in 24 languages contrasting the direct route along which Jews were taken away to be murdered with the crooked, dangerous and obstructed routes faced by those trying to escape their killers.
It is deeply moving. Raoul Wallenberg went from Sweden to Budapest in 1944 and, through protective passports, safe houses and extraordinary personal courage, helped save thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation and murder. After a day of kings, palaces, battles and warships, this was history brought back to individual human choices and courage. We stood quietly for a while before moving on.
The art continued even when we went underground.
Stockholm’s Tunnelbana is often described as the world’s longest art exhibition and, for once, that doesn’t feel like tourist-board hyperbole. Most of its stations contain some form of artistic treatment, ranging from sculpture and mosaics to entire cavernous stations conceived as works of art. It had struck us repeatedly as we travelled around the city: Stockholm seems remarkably determined that public art should be encountered as part of everyday life rather than requiring a ticket and a museum entrance.
Back at Göran and Anna’s flat, we received the most wonderful welcome from Harald and his cousins, with friends and family gathered for the next instalment of Mark’s birthday. Migo joined us too, so our guide for the day became part of the celebrations.The flat itself is beautiful, created within what was once a chocolate factory, with the proportions and character of the old industrial building still evident beneath its new life as a home.
Then came a proper Swedish birthday fika, complete with a prinsesstårta, the wonderfully distinctive Princess cake covered in green marzipan.
Mark was given the honour of cutting it before Harald, his cousins and everyone else assembled launched enthusiastically into the Swedish birthday song. The Swedish version has rather greater ambitions than our own. Instead of merely wishing you a happy birthday, everyone declares that he shall live for a hundred years. Surrounded by family, friends and a considerable quantity of Princess cake, Mark seemed perfectly content to accept the proposal.
Finally, we headed out with Göran, Anna and Harald for Mark’s birthday dinner at Rolfs Kök. Mark began with rye bread madeleines with Kalix vendace roe, red onion and sour cream, followed by red-wine-braised ox cheeks with truffle and potato purée. I started with gratinated red prawns with goat’s cheese, garlic and lemon, followed by the fish stew with shrimps, mussels, cream and aioli. A properly celebratory meal and a lovely way to round off the day.
What made the day particularly special, though, was the people. We could have followed a guidebook around Gamla Stan, found the Palace and bought tickets for the Vasa Museum ourselves. Instead, we saw Stockholm through the eyes of an old friend who knows and understands his city, before being welcomed into two of my dearest friends’ beautiful home to celebrate Mark’s birthday with family and friends.
For Mark’s birthday, I’m not sure we could have planned anything better.
