Gamla Uppsala

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Gamla Uppsala, or ‘Old Uppsala’, is Uppsala from the Viking times.  Actually, it’s not quite that simple.  You see, way back when, Uppsala was founded, a few miles north of its current location.  With changing river patterns and so forth, eventually it made more sense to have a city in the current location of Uppsala, so the city more or less moved to its present location.  The original location, however, still does have the remains of the original settlement.  Interestingly, it’s not quite like your average Roman remains, which often are ruins, or at least abandoned for centuries.  Some of the buildings, such as the parish church, are still in use, and thus in quite good condition.

I decided to head out to Gamla Uppsala on a whim on Sunday.  More precisely, I decided to take a walk with a vague notion that I might end up at Gamla Uppsala, and what do you know, I did.

When I left, the evening was still young.  They’re doing some road work on one of the major roads, as seen in the picture below.

However, it took quite awhile to get there, about two hours, five miles, or eight kilometers.  My plan had been to go to the police station and then go north, but when I encountered a nice riverside path shortly before the police station, I took that instead.  Slightly longer in all likelihood, but it was nice to walk along the river.  I didn’t run into anyone I knew before reaching that path, so I didn’t have to explain why I was going to the police station.

There were houses, apartments, and occasionally businesses along the river, but it was also nicely wooded.  Fairly often I would see fishing docks or canoes along the edge of the river, occasionally with people on the docks.  The below photo illustrates this nicely:

 

It is an unfortunate consequence of the angle of the sun that my pictures along this stretch all came out with things appearing darker than they actually are.  I continued along the river for twenty to thirty minutes, before heading east, and by the end the sun was nearing the horizon in the west.

I managed not to get lost despite not having a map (thanks road signs!) and half an hour later passed a sign announcing that I was in Gamla Uppsala.  But it didn’t look like what I expected for a Viking settlement.  Rather, it looked quite…

… ordinary.  It was at this point that I realized that Gamla Uppsala not only refers to the Viking settlement and the historic area there, but it also refers to the suburb of Uppsala that’s located at and just south of where Uppsala originally was.  Kind of like how there’s Williamsburg and Colonial Williamsburg, only in this case with the same name, I think (I should know this better having gone to college in Virginia…).  But not a big problem, there were signs directing me to the Gamla Uppsala.

Once in Gamla Uppsala, one of the first things I saw was the parish church.

Originally, this was a cathedral, and much larger.  It also housed the remains of St. Erik, who technically never became a saint in the Catholic Church but is considered one in Sweden anyway, and is the patron saint of Stockholm.  In the 13th century, there was a fire, the remains of St. Erik were moved to the current Uppsala cathedral (also technically a church), where I saw his relicary in January (see Visiting the Cathedral, although I don’t have a picture), and the cathedral seen above became its present parish church.

Another significant sight were the burial mounds.  They are older than the church, and pagan.  No one knows for sure who is buried in them, but they are almost certainly of royal blood.  An excavation was done in the 1800s after someone suggested that the mounds might have been natural formations rather than burial mounds.  Not willing to let this affront to Swedish tradition stand, the King ordered an excavation on one of the mounds, and sure enough, they were actual burial mounds.

Although it may look like your ordinary grassy knoll in this photo, they are quite sizeable in real life.  There are three primary burial mounds at the site, today known as the East, Center, and West mounds.  Earlier they were named after early Swedish kings who it was thought might have been buried there, but today, with uncertainty over who is buried, the directional names are used.  It’s quite possible we’ll never know who is buried there, as the remains were cremated before being buried, a necessary condition for reaching Valhalla in Viking tradition.  However, as at least the Center mound has never been excavated, it’s not impossible that this could change.

To the west of the central settlement, a couple millennia ago, lie the Baltic Sea.  The high grounds today, including where Gamla Uppsala is, were islands in the sea.  Gradually the waters receded, until the water was a lake, not part of the sea, and then until the lands were a marsh, rather than a lake.  This is what it was like in the 500-1000 AD period when Uppsala was a Viking settlement.  As an interesting linguistic tidbit, this change also resulted in the Swedish word träsk changing in meaning from lake to marsh, its current meaning.  Gradually the marsh dried out, making farming in the area possible.

The farmland is seen between the hill and the horizon in the above picture, taken from the hill.  Apparently if you come during the snowmelt season (it’s almost long enough to be its own season in Uppsala), the farmlands resemble marshes even today.

Even though I was several miles north of town, that didn’t mean I couldn’t find my way back to town if need be.  For the cathedral and castle, the two largest landmarks in the city, were visible even from this far out.

 

That’s the cathedral with the spires, and the castle in pink on its left.  Slightly less blurry in real life!  But that I could get this good of a picture, looking away from the sun at 9:48 PM, attests to how much longer the days are now.  That’s at least six hours later sunset than it was when I got here, and a much earlier sunrise as well.  Even as I write this now, shortly before 11 PM, you can tell which way is west because the sky isn’t as dark in that direction.  There is still a night, but it’s becoming rather short.

After seeing the burial mounds, I found the outdoor museum, which doesn’t open until June 1.  I then tried to find the Viking settlement, but I must have been slightly off in setting the map to real places, as I could find neither that nor the wall remains (unless they were the walls near the church, which certainly didn’t look that old).  There’s also an indoor museum, which wasn’t open at 10 PM, of course, and a few other places south of where I explored in Gamla Uppsala.  A daytime visit is necessary to complete the tour.  But it was certainly nice to get a start on exploring the old city, as well as to see the river north of town.

If you prefer a slightly shorter, less intensive way to get to Gamla Uppsala, there are a number of busses that go there, and you can catch one back as late as midnight.  I took the #2 back, which conveniently goes all the way back to Flogsta without any connections, and even more conveniently, was waiting outside the entrance for its scheduled departure time when I left.  The bus trip took about 30 minutes, which I may have been able to make slightly shorter by taking two busses with a connection in between.