The Colorful Fascination of Visby

I use the word “colorful” not only in the sense of multi-dyed, diversely-colored, but also varied, different. All this describes the so-called Capital of Gotland Island – the absolute holiday destination of Sweden. Visby has a small airport, but access is mainly through the ferries of Destination Gotland, leaving from two ports south of Stockholm; I am not mentioning the rare international lines from the Eastern Baltik. In the summer, tickets are astronomical and still have to be booked early because they are gone very quickly.

If you’re thinking of an endless party type of island vacation, Gotland will surprise you. The ultimate Swedish summer vacation involves healthy outdoor activities like trekking, jogging, summer skiing and cycling, eating ice cream amidst historic architecture and taking photos with landscape phenomena. And of course, swimming in the Baltic. There are sandy beaches here instead of peaty ones, and the water is almost blue. The fact that at its best, the temperature doesn’t exceed 20 degrees Celsius doesn’t bother a soul.

The old town of Visby is sheltered behind impressive stone walls. Together, they form an attractive medieval complex, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. It is home to the best-preserved fortified trading town from the time of the Hanseatic League, or the Northern European trading union, which existed from the 12th to the 17th centuries. The city walls are certainly remarkably well-preserved, considering they date back to the 13th century.

The old town, enclosed by these walls, is a fascinating mix of different periods. Older wooden houses, usually single-storied, are nestled between later and taller buildings, some made of stone and some of brick, with or without balconies, plain or colorful. Some are occupied by their actual owners, others have been converted into guesthouses, shops and restaurants. Some look as if they are climbing on top of others, and some elements of the architecture have been glued to the original structure later on.

A characteristic feature of Old Visby are the ruins of medieval churches, emerging naturally among the other buildings. I’m not sure how many of them there are around the city; we read that the first churches on the island in Viking times were wooden, like in mainland Sweden, and in the 13th century there was a sharp boom in stone church building. Some numbers were quoted as over 100 churches for the entire island, with the largest concentration naturally being in the “capital” city.

I won’t show them to you one by one; I chose to introduce you to St. Lars, also known as St. Lawrence. It is named after a 3rd century Christian saint who, as the sign informed us, achieved martyrdom by being grilled – and I don’t want to sound disrespectful. The church differs from the others because, although it was built by local craftsmen, it was more reminiscent of Byzantine building traditions. Staircases and corridors are inserted into the walls, allowing you to walk around the entire building.

Another local landmark is Visby Cathedral, officially called St. Mary’s. Built at the same time as the others, in the 16th century it remained the only functioning church in the city and was promoted to cathedral status. The colorful stained glass windows are clearly from a later period, and the interior decoration, in the local style, is much more sparse than what we are used to in our Eastern Orthodox part of the world. We would probably agree that it has a kind of austere, if somewhat cold, stone beauty.

You can learn more about Visby history and traditions at the Gotland Museum, also a designated local landmark. Although we already considered ourselves Viking experts after visiting N number of museums around Sweden, the local versions of Viking gravestones managed to surprise us. If you look closely at the examples below, you will notice very clearly how some of the commissioners could afford better artists than others. How on some of the stones the horses look like horses, and on others you can’t even tell what people are holding in their hands.

In the museum, we found other characteristic features of local culture as well. For example, the interior design of the church. It turned out that the replacement of wooden churches with stone ones did not automatically lead to the replacement of the elements of the interior decoration. The entire iconostases, as well as all the sculptures, remained wooden. Each church had an altar dedicated to the Madonna with her wooden sculpture, located in the northern, “female” end of the temple. Here, too, it was quite visible who could afford the better sculptors and who couldn’t.

We should not miss the Treasury of the Visby Museum. I am convinced that every visitor chooses their own favorites among the exhibits of precious metals and precious stones. I could not help but make a comparison with the silver treasures found in our lands, and from much earlier times. This is what a Viking silver treasure looks like (around 880 AD): 312 bracelets, 50 rings, 10,000 coins of (mostly) Arab origin. Buried in a wooden chest, which was lucky, because in an animal skin they would have oxidized and darkened.