Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The interior
Unlike many other southern Swedish castles, this one is straight out of a storybook,
boasting turrets, ramparts, a moat and drawbridge and a dungeon. The fully
furnished interior - reached by crossing an authentically reconstructed wooden
drawbridge
and going through a stone-arched tunnel beyond the grassy ramparts
- is great fun for a wander. Among the many highlights are the
King's Chamber
with
its coffered ceiling, the
Queen's Suite
and the
Golden Room.
The tour guides will tell
you that the castle is rattling with ghosts, but for more tangible evidence of life
during the Vasa period, the kitchen fireplace is good enough; it was built to
accommodate the simultaneous roasting of three cows. There's a splendidly
minimalist
café
just inside the walls, dominated by a wonderfully evocative oil
painting of a moody chamber interior.
6
The King's Chamber
he
King's Chamber
(King Eric's bedroom) is the most visually exciting - the wall frieze
is a riot of vividly painted animals and shows a wild boar attacking Eric and another
man saving him. Eric apparently suffered from paranoia, believing his younger brother
Johan wanted to kill him. To this end, he had a secret door, which you can see cut into
the extravagantly inlaid wall panels, with escape routes to the roof in the event of
fraternal attack. Eric's suspicions may have been justified - Johan is widely believed to
have poisoned him with arsenic in 1569.
The Queen's Suite
Though originally in the King's Chamber, his oak
bed
now resides in the
Queen's Suite
,
which is otherwise surprisingly void of furniture. It is the only surviving piece of
furniture from the castle and was originally stolen from Denmark. It is curiously
decorated with carved faces on the posts, but all their noses have been chopped off
- the king believed that the nose contained the soul and didn't want the avenging souls
of the rightful owners coming to haunt him.
The Golden Room
Adjoining the Queen's Suite, the
Golden Room
, with its magnificent ceiling, should
have been Johan's bedroom but sibling hatred meant he didn't sleep here while Eric
lived. There are a couple of huge and intriguing portraits: though Gustav Vasa was
already of an advanced age when his was painted, he appears young-looking, with
unseemly muscular legs. The royal artist had been ordered to seek out the soldier with
the best legs and paint those, before attempting a sympathetic portrayal of Vasa's face.
The portrait next to his is of Queen Margareta, her ghostly white countenance achieved
in real life through the daily application of lead and arsenic. Isolated on another wall is
King Eric's portrait, hung much higher up than the others: his family believed that the
mental illness from which he supposedly suffered could be caught by looking into his
eyes - even images of them.
Konstmuseum
Stadsparken • Tues, Thurs & Sun noon-5pm, Wed till 7pm • 50kr •
W
kalmarkonstmuseum.se
Having left the castle, wandering back towards the town centre along Slottsvägen will
bring you to Kalmar's grotesque
Konstmuseum
, a monstrous cube of a building dressed
in black wooden panels plonked unceremoniously in the middle of Stadsparken, where
there's an emphasis on Abstract Expressionist work painted by Swedish artists in the
1940s and 1950s. The museum's collection contains several nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Swedish nude and landscape paintings, including some fine works by Anders
Zorn and Carl Larsson, though exhibitions change regularly. In addition, there are
often temporary displays of contemporary art.
