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| Grand Square |
The entire tour group joined us today and together we
visited more of Old Town. The Grand
Square is the site of the bloodbath of 1520. The Danes had laid siege to
the old town and the people were starving. After the Swedes surrendered, the Swedish
nobles were invited to a banquet for the coronation of the Danish King as King
of Sweden. Three days later, the nobles were again assembled by the archbishop,
but this time eighty two of them were executed in the square. Two years later,
King Vasa of Sweden recaptured Stockholm.
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| Golden Hall |
We then visited the City Hall, site of
the banquet each year for the Nobel Prize winners. The prize was created by Alfred
Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, the year before he died. Blue hall is where
the banquet is held. After the banquet, dancing is held in the Golden Hall
covered in 18.6 million tiles. The council room was unusual for the time, it
has one gallery for the citizens, another for the press to listen to the
council deliberations. With 14 political parties in Sweden, everything is a
compromise.
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| St. George and the Dragon |
With our free time, we decided to explore the Stockholm Cathedral. It has been used as the coronation church for centuries. The wooden statue (dedicated in 1489) of St. George and the dragon symbolizes the Swedish relations with the Danes: they have fought throughout the 14th to 17th centuries. That afternoon, we left the Stockholm Archipelagos of 20,000 islands.
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| Sailing out the Stockholm Archipelago |
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