20.06.2011 – 20.06.2011  12 °C

I spent my final day in Stockholm visiting the House of Nobility and the Stockholm Palace.

The House of Nobility was only open for a very short window today so had to make that my first stop this morning. The ‘House’ was built in the mid 1600s as a place for the Swedish nobility to meet for the running of the country (back when it wasn’t a fledged democracy and the nobles ran the country). Based on the number of coup’s that have occurred in the Swedish history I’m sure it was also used to bitch about the Royal family and of course the peasants! Basically, it is one big room that is dedicated as the meeting room for the nobles. Today there are only about 700 noble families remaining in Sweden (of the 2500 represented in the ‘House’) and they have no official power except as citizens of Sweden. They still meet once every three years to discuss something! (I couldn’t quite work out why they still meet, maybe it’s like one big family reunion??)

I found Nanna’s ancestor’s coat of arms on the wall “David Af Sandeberg” who was awarded his knight hood in the late 1700s.. For those who aren’t related to the family, Nanna tells me that her cousin is still the head of the house and apparently lives somewhere in Stockholm..

After finding Nanna’s ancestor (and looking amongst 2500 coat of arms isn’t that easy!) I walked around the corner to the Stockholm Palace. The Stockholm Palace is still the official residence of the King and Queen of Sweden although both don’t actually live in the palace! The palace is used mainly as a tourist attraction (museum) and occasionally official ceremonies are held in the palace for VIP guests or major events in Sweden.

The palace must be one of the oldest in Europe. The original foundations were laid in 980 AD, with the current structure being built in the late 1600s (the original palace burnt down in a huge fire in the late 1600s). The palace is quite interesting to visit as you can see the crown jewels of the Swedish Royal Family as well as the palace itself and another museum in the vaults of the palace shows you the original foundations of the old palace! Really interesting!

I guess the part I enjoyed the most was the ‘Tre Kronor’ museum; the Three Crowns.. The 3 crowns is the official symbol of Sweden and dates well back to before the palace was built. The 3 crowns represent the holy trinity, and I guess therefore showing the divine right of the kings to rule over the country. The Tre Kronor museum is the part of the palace where you can see the old foundations. It is a large vaulted network of room’s deep underground from the palace. Over the past two hundred years many archeological digs have occurred under the palace and the Tre Kronor is the result. The old walls of the palace were over 5m thick and look to me to be made of any sort of rocks they could find tightly fitted together with some sort of mortar. Definitely not defined bricks, rocks put together! When you get up close and take a look it’s amazing how they made them fit together and to think that the whole palace was made like this is just incredible (the palace is at least a whole office block wide and long—it’s huge!)

The palace burnt down in the late 1600s as most of the inside and roof etc was made of wood. It’s quite a funny story as to why the palace burnt down. Back then the palace had a large workforce dedicated to keeping fires at bay. I guess with the amount of internal fires, candles etc the chance of fire was quite high so a large workforce was employed for the sole duty of making sure that any fire that starts is immediately put out. Therefore each few rooms had its two fire wardens whose sole job was to patrol and put out any conflagrations. Unfortunately the head of the fire wardens (probably like all civil servants… I can hear the protests loudly to this statement!!) was a little corrupt and used to run his own black market gambling syndicate on the side to make some extra coin.. Therefore most of the fire wardens were normally out in the city working on this venture and not actually patrolling the castle! Where the fire first broke out, one of the wardens was off doing an errand for the gambling syndicate and the other (who was supposed to be on the look out) decided he was hungry and would go for an early lunch.. Well the rest is history (literally) and the whole palace burnt down! The final result was that the chief fire warden was severely punished by public flogging.. He had to run up and down in front of where the old palace was and every person watching had to flog him on his way past. Basically he had to keep running (and being flogged) until he eventually died.. Nasty way to die!

Like all civic places in Sweden the palace closed at 5pm so I spent the rest of my afternoon preparing for my trip to Oslo and wandering around the city. Unfortunately there is so much I didn’t get to see of Stockholm—it is such a beautiful and easy city to get around that I’ll definitely put it on my list for a return visit. If you are going to come and stay make sure you stay in Gamla- Stan (the old town) as it is just picture post card and so close to all of the attractions!

So here I say “Adjo” to Stockholm and “Hey” to Oslo (Hey is great because it is the word for Hello in Finland, Sweden and Norway!)