24.07.2011 – 24.07.2011  13 °C

Another early start and another train trip to another part of Denmark. This time I left Copenhagen for Roskilde. Roskilde is on the western side of Zealand and is about 35min from downtown Copenhagen (actually to get to the furthest part of Denmark from Copenhagen only takes 2.5hrs!)

The whole day was wet, windy and damn cold (top temp today was only 13 deg) and I was not really prepared for that cold a day so I was feeling a mite miserable for most of it!!

Anyway got off the train and walked into town to see Roskilde Cathedral. Roskilde is the traditional capital city of Denmark and was founded before 1000 AD. It was the main Viking stronghold in Denmark and has many Viking relics; it is also home to Roskilde Cathedral- UNESCO listed cathedral that houses all of the tombs of the Danish royal family since the 1500s.

I arrived at the church to realise that it was a Sunday and the cathedral wouldn’t be open til after lunch.. now considering it was about 10.45 and it was raining, cold and nothing was open I was feeling a touch grumpy with myself for not working all of this out earlier back in my nice snug room! I mean “deh, its Sunday of course the cathedral isn’t going to be open to visitors!” Anyway my guide book said that there was a Viking museum and village in the town so I thought I’d go for a wander and see if I could find it.. I mean I’d come all this way (not) on the train so I may as well stick out the time til the church opened—I did debate with myself for at least 10min as to whether I was better to just cut my losses and return to Copenhagen…

As it turned out the Viking museum was a very pleasant 10 min walk down the hill from the cathedral to the sea through the cathedral’s park lands. I blessed myself with holy water coming from a fountain on the way to the museum—the fountain is supposedly supposed to heal ailments and is dedicated to St John the Baptist.. I figured I couldn’t go wrong and anointed myself to keep away any bugs and germs… we all know that holy water is better than boiled don’t we??? (those of you who know my St Benedict story will know what I’m talking about).

The museum itself is based around a tonne of archaeological digs that have been carried out in the area and all obviously from the Viking age. The Viking age in Denmark is from 800AD to about 1300AD. The museum is home to 5 Viking age ships—not in as good shape as the ones we saw in Oslo but still interesting. I was fortunate to attend a guided tour that was conducted by one of the archaeologists so I got a bit more detail about their life and times. Apparently they had different types of ships—merchant, war boat and fishing.. The museum has examples of all three. The ships were excavated off the ocean floor and they believe that the ships were actually sunk by the Vikings to blockade part of the fjord leading up to Roskilde for defensive reasons.

When the Vikings went to war they had approx. 30 to 35 warriors assigned to each boat.. from a space perspective it means that each warrior had enough room to lie down but not enough to do much more! The bottom of the boat would be filled with provisions and weapons and at the most they could only carry 5 days of provisions with them, so it is likely that merchant boats would have gone with them to cook and carry food for the warriors.

Interesting fact- Vikings did not wear helmets with horns!! None have ever been found on any of the excavations so the archaeologists are baffled where that description of a Viking comes from!

The Danes have also built a replica Viking boat and have sailed it to Ireland. It took them 55 days round trip from Roskilde to Dublin and back! The boat was manned as it would have been in Viking days and looking at the footage you can see why they didn’t have any space.. they barely had space to sit let alone lie down to sleep!

After a journey into the Viking age I returned back up the hill to see the cathedral. The cathedral is one of the earliest erected in Denmark and is the traditional seat of the Lutheran (was a Catholic cathedral) Church in Denmark. It also houses the Danish Royal crypts. It is quite spooky to walk around a cathedral with all of these marble coffins everywhere.. I mean there are bodies that are decaying in there!!!! It was also quite different to the one I went to in St Petersberg—there it was very ornate and grandiose so it sort of took away from the fact that there were actually people buried inside! This cathedral is quite large and there weren’t’ many tourists so the vaults tended to echo a bit, it was quite cold and poorly lit so the overall feeling was quite spooky!!!

Like probably all royal vaults there were some monster mausoleums.. you could tell who the rich kings were!

Left the ABC and returned back to Copenhagen miserably wet and cold (that was partly because I lost my umbrella in the Cathedral and when I went hunting I discovered that it had been taken….  )

Oh well, last day in Copenhagen has certainly been different! Off to Warsaw tomorrow!