Birka

Today we took a ferry to Birka Island in Lake Mälar, about an hour and 45 minutes by boat from Stockholm. It leaves from right next to the city hall, which you can see it the first photo. Very striking place, the city hall -- we had our opening reception for the IAMCR conference there Monday night.

In the next photo are a bunch of people getting off our ferry, the Victoria, at Birka. It was a beautiful day to be out on the water. There is a simply amazing quality to summer light in Scandinavia, more on that later.

The reason for going to Birka, aside from taking a beautiful ferry ride through a fjord in Sweden -- something I would be dying to do anyway -- is that it is one of the sites that has produced the most information about how a Viking settlement actually lived. There was a trading village there from the 800s to 1000, which left hundreds of graves behind, which were largely untouched, with all their grave goods.

Most of the original things found have been moved to the National Museum of Antiquities in Stockholm, but they have created a nice museum to explain the site with maps, replicas of what the village might have looked like, and replicas of a lot of the best stuff. I was intrigued with a map of the Viking world, shown here with our museum guide, Elin.

We also took a tour of the grave sights, the village site, and a fort that stood on a hill over- looking the village -- both enclosed by a city wall and stockade.  Here is our other guide, Ulrike, on the hill beside the fort, overlooking the fjord and a meadow (now) where the village stood. The meadow was excavated in the 1990s and they found a lot of interesting things there, too. It is amazing what archeologists can do with ancient garbage dumps.

We walked back to the ferry area to have lunch and do some shopping in the museum store. (Always a danger in Scandinavia when your wife teaches Viking history and literature -- we ate lightly to compensate.) Right across from the store was a stand of birch trees that made me think again of how much I like the quality of light coming through the trees in Scandinavia summer.

Here is a view of the hill that the fort stands on. The spot is marked by a cross, a monument to a Christian missionary who helped convert the village back in the 1000s. The shot is from the ferry we took back to Stockholm. Fabulous day despite a wee bit of sunburn.