Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1
with other towns of the Hanseatic League, such as Hamburg, that helped give
Stockholm, rather than Sigtuna, its prominent position within the Swedish realm
during the fourteen and fifteenth centuries. Following the breakup of the Kalmar
Union with Denmark, Swedish king Gustav Vasa established royal power in
Stockholm, enabling the city to grow into the capital of one of Europe's major
powers by the seventeenth century. Military defeat by Russia in the Great Northern
War (1700-21) put paid to Swedish territorial expansion in northern and eastern
Europe, and, instead, Stockholm developed politically and culturally at the centre of
a smaller Swedish state.
By the nineteenth century, Stockholm was still essentially rural with country lanes,
great orchards, grazing cows and even windmills in the centre of the city; the downside
was the lack of pavements (until the 1840s) or piped water supply (until 1858), and
the presence of open sewers, squalid streets and crowded slums. Having escaped bomb
damage during World War II thanks to Swedish neutrality, the mid-twentieth century
ushered in a huge
modernization
programme as part of the Social Democratic
out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new policy: Sweden, and particularly the capital,
Stockholm, was to become a place fit for working people to live. Old areas were torn
down as “a thousand homes for a thousand Swedes” - as the project had it - were
constructed. Today, Stockholm is a bright and elegant place, and with its great expanses
of open water right in the centre, it offers a spectacular city panorama unparalleled
anywhere in Europe.
Old Stockholm: Gamla Stan and around
Three islands - Riddarholmen, Staden and Helgeandsholmen - make up the
oldest
part of Stockholm
, a cluster of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings backed
by hairline medieval alleys. It was on these three adjoining polyps of land that Birger
Jarl erected the town's first fortifications. Rumours abound as to the derivation of the
name “Stockholm”, though it's now widely believed to mean “island cleared of trees”,
since the trees on the island that is now home to Gamla Stan were probably felled to
make way for the settlement. Incidentally, the words
holm
(island) and
stock
(log) are
still in common use today. You can experience a taste of Stockholm's medieval past at
the excellent
Medeltidsmuseum
, at the northern end of the two bridges - Norrbron
and Riksbron - which lead across to Gamla Stan.
Although strictly speaking only the largest island, Staden, contains
Gamla Stan
,
this name is usually attached to the buildings and streets of all three islands. Once
Stockholm's working centre, nowadays Gamla Stan is primarily a tourist city with
many an eminently strollable area, in particular around the
Kungliga Slottet
(royal
palace),
Riksdagshuset
(parliament building) and
Storkyrkan
(cathedral). The central
spider's web of streets - best approached over the bridges of Norrbron or Riksbron
- is a sprawl of monumental buildings and high airy churches which form a
protective girdle around the narrow lanes. Some of the impossibly slender alleys lead
to steep steps ascending between battered walls, others are covered passageways
linking leaning buildings. The tall, dark houses in the centre were mostly owned by
wealthy merchants, and are still distinguished by their intricate doorways and
portals bearing coats of arms. The main square of the Old Town is
Stortorget
, an
impressive collection of tall pastel-coloured stone buildings with curling gables
which saw one of the medieval city's most ferocious battles, the “Stockholm
Bloodbath” (see p.357). Of the western shore of Gamla Stan, the tiny islet of
Riddarholmen
houses not only one of Stockholm's most beautiful churches,
Riddarholmskyrkan
, the burial place for countless Swedish kings and queens over
the centuries, but also the Baroque
Riddarhuset
(House of the Nobility), a reminder
of the glory days of the Swedish aristocracy.
