Gamla Stan

Me at the gateway going FROM the king's palace (it replaced the Palace of the Tre Kronor--three crowns--when it burned down in the 1600s) on Gamla Stan (Old Town), heading TO the tiny island where the Parliament meets. In summer, street musicians play here and the acoustics are amazing.

Gamla Stan, the original part of Stockholm, which is on its own island in Stockholm, first became a town in the late 1200s and early 1300s. Compared with places such as Italy, Greece, or even England, Sweden has relatively recent human habitation, as it took longer for it to recover from the literally miles-thick glacier sheet that covered it during the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. As I mentioned when describing Old Uppsala, numerous areas that are now islands or even mainland were covered by water until that last 1000 or 2000 years. Additionally, the earliest local settlements did NOT included Stockholm, which finally developed as a town because it could be used to guard the entrance to Lake Malaren and to collect tariffs from merchant ships on their way in and out of the lake. Most historians think that the name Stockholm comes from the word for stockade, as Gamla Stan was surrounded by a wooden palisade, out in the water, to protect it from attack. Hence Stockholm is Stockade Island ("holm" means island).

We went last weekend to the Museum of Medieval Stockholm and learned that there were a couple of monasteries and a convent on Gamla Stan in the 1300s. There was digging being done to build a car-park, and they discovered the foundations walls for the convent, and then found part of the original town wall. The museum is built right into these sights, with reconstructions of the original Old Town. It was pretty wonderful, as all the museums in Sweden have been so far.

one of the wonderful tiny medieval alleyways in Gamla Stan, that connect the narrow, cobble-stoned streets.

We FINALLY got to see the Old City Cathedral in Gamla Stan (we kept showing up past closing time or when they were having some sort of concert or whatever). This church (kyrka, pronounced “cheerka”) is one of the oldest in Stockholm, of course, being from the 1300s (and therefore having been built BEFORE the Reformation), and is the Royal Church. It has a 17^th century altar made of silver and ebony,

a set of Royal Pews

(the current king and his wife were married there in 1976, and the Crown Princess—meaning she will inherit the throne—got married there this past summer), and an amazing carved oak statue of St. George and the Dragon from 1489. The dragon has elk, moose and reindeer antlers sticking out from its head, and the whole thing is amazing.