Gotland is the biggest island in the Baltic (we were told). It belongs to Sweden and has a year-round population of 60,000 people. During the summer months that population grows substantially. We saw three ferries in town today from the mainland.
It's a beautiful island, very idyllic and the interior reminds me a lot of the interior of Martha’s Vineyard. Visby is the biggest town on the island and still has many medieval buildings intact, including its city wall that goes back to the 1200’s when the Danes and Germans had taken over the island.
The island has been overrun by the Danes, Russians and Swedes over its long history. In addition to its amazing city wall the city has a few medieval churches still standing, sort of. At least the skeletons are still there.
The Russians invaded at the turn of the last century. Our guide didn’t want to get into politics, or recent history but he did mention how happy everyone was now they are in NATO. They’ve had to step up their military spending and will actually have more military on the island as part of that initiative, right now there are about 300 stationed here.
In addition to spending time in the city, we got out into the countryside. There are 92 churches on the island and remember the population is 60,000. It seems that every small group of 10-12 families wanted their own church. They are mostly simple in design like the one pictured below with a small Parsons’ house. It was plainly decorated inside and is still in use. The churches are Lutheran, although there was one small Catholic Church in Visby.
Vikings also play a part in their history and we visited a burial site, one of about 300 on the island and they all have the same structure. Rocks are formed to look like a ship that will take the deceased into the next world. Only one person would be buried in this site. This one is very well preserved but we did see another one just off the road when we were driving around.
Fishing is an important leisure activity here. I didn’t get the impression there were any big professional fleets still active, but I might have missed that information. We went to a small enclave of fishing shacks. These shacks are used to store equipment mostly but we did see a couple sitting outside one so we wondered if they also use them to stay when at the marina. Our huge bus was able to just fit through these shacks.
For some reason we had a very short day on the island today. Normally all aboard would be 4:30-5:00PM or even later but today it was 2:30. We had no time to look around on our own and explore the city wall towers. This will go in my review of the cruise. It was such a nice city, with such an interesting history. On one hand you curse the way cruises work and the short time at each port, but on the other hand, we would never know this place existed if the ship hadn’t stopped here.
I love colorful doors...
Tomorrow we’re on a Danish Island to visit Ronne.
No comments:
Post a Comment