Museum Gustavianum and More

After a good night’s sleep to hopefully overcome the jet lag after arriving in Sweden yesterday, I was showered, dressed, breakfasted, and ready to go here in Uppsala around 10:00 in the morning. The indoor sights that I was considering for today, including the one I visited this morning, Museum Gustavianum, don’t open until 11:00. So I had some time to do some wandering around, hence the “and more” in the title.

Wandering Around Uppsala

Most of the wandering I did before visiting the Museum Gustavianum included some directed walking to a couple of landmarks mentioned in my guidebooks, Stora Torget and Universitetsparken, but I also stumbled upon the Uppsala Old Cemetery.

On my walks, I saw a couple more charming sections of Uppsala in addition to what I saw yesterday. I so far concur with my initial impression of yesterday. There is nothing absolutely spectacular here, but there is a lot to very much like. It’s a very pleasant, small city.

Stora Torget

Stora Torget* is Uppsala’s main public square. It’s not so much what I think of as a public square. It’s an intersection with effectively four small squares at each corner. The buildings around it are handsome. In truth, I’d been through it yesterday because one of the streets that forms the intersection is the pedestrianized shopping street that I walked along yesterday. However, then, I didn’t realize that it was considered a public square. It just looked like an intersection with larger-than-usual open spaces on the corners.

One of those quadrants has a fountain, and they all have a few trees.

(*In truth, I’m not sure that the square’s name is Stora Torget. The guidebook that directed me there just said it was Uppsala’s main square at 1 Stora Torget. I used Google Translate and learned that “Stora Torget” translates to “Big Street” in English.)

Universitetsparken

Universitetspaken is a park within Uppsala University. I would have guessed that from the name without using Google Translate or looking at a map. The park is not large, but is quite peaceful with lots of mature trees and a statue. Around the periphery of the park, there are nine rune stones. The signs beside each of them said the inscriptions on the stones were from the 11th century. So, that’s cool.

Uppsala Old Cemetery

I saw the Uppsala Old Cemetery from the other side of a fence yesterday. It’s just beyond the Carolinaparken that I visited then. When I spied it yesterday, I thought it was not just an old cemetery, but a very, very, old cemetery. Some of the gravestones looked ancient.

I went in today and found that, while there might be a centuries-old section or two that I didn’t get to today (it’s a large cemetery), the earliest gravestone I spotted was for someone who died within the last 200 years. I didn’t look at anywhere close to all of the tombstone inscriptions, but the vast majority that I saw were for people who died within the last 100 years, and many within the last 25 years. And some were within the last decade.

Despite that, many of the newer stones looked quite old and weathered.

All of the plots I saw—all of them—had small Zen gardens in front of the gravestones. Many of them were simply unidirectional raked rows of stones. Some had a few rows perpendicular to the main set of rows. And a couple had curved patterns of raked stones. That’s something I haven’t seen in any other cemeteries.

Overall, the cemetery is very peaceful, with fairly dense stands of trees.

And then it was time to head to this morning’s main attraction, the Museum Gustavianum.

Museum Gustavianum

Museum Gustavianum is part of Uppsala University. It’s a small, eclectic museum that, despite or maybe because of its size, is a very good one.

The price of admission to the Gustavianum includes an English-language tour that lasts about 40 minutes. The first tour of the day, the one I went on, started just fifteen minutes after the museum’s opening.

The guide hit only the highlights of the Museum Gustavianum, and there were a few rooms she didn’t go into at all. However, guests are free to wander around the museum independently before or after the tour, or not go on the tour at all.

The first room the guide went into displays artifacts from the university. There, she spent some time talking about the history of Uppsala University. The university was founded in 1477 on a charter from the pope. It was built on land donated by the Archbishop of Uppsala, which explains why it’s just across the street from the Uppsala Cathedral that I visited yesterday.

There has never been a time since then when Uppsala University ceased to exist as a legal entity, but there was a period in the 16th century when it was dormant. The university was revived in the 17th century by the King of Sweden. At the time, its curriculum was expanded in the arts and sciences.

That revived university is the foundation of today’s thriving Uppsala University.

Among the artifacts in this room is an original copy of the Pope’s charter from 1477. (I say “original copy” to distinguish it from a later reproduction. A number of copies of the charter were created in 1477, so there is no one copy that is the original. This is one of those originals.)

Another display case in this room held some tools used during a ceremony at the start of a school year called “deposition.” This was an initiation for new students. The incoming class dressed up in costumes with animal parts on them, such as donkey ears and boar tusks. The tools were employed by students who’d already been at the university for at least a couple of years to hack off, according to the sign in the case, the “beastliness and stupidity.”

The tools were wooden and quite substantial. There was one shaped like and the size of an axe. Another had the shape of a pickaxe. There was also a device with criss-crossed pieces jointed with bolts that looked like it could be made to expand and contract.

Here’s the thing. Like I said, they were wooden, not Smurf toys, and quite substantial. The costumes with the pieces to be removed were worn by the new students, not held in front of them on ten-foot poles. I can’t help but wonder if there were any injuries or deaths from poorly aimed swings of the devices, possibly as a result of one too many beers consumed by members of the senior class.

The guide then led us to the Augsburg Art Cabinet, which had been donated to Gustav II Adolf in 1632. I’d read about the Art Cabinet in my guidebooks, but I had the wrong impression. I thought it was a small room with a wide collection of small art curios. That’s not what it is.

It’s an ornately decorated cabinet that sits on a low base in a large glass case. It’s hard to tell, but I think that if the cabinet were flush with the floor, the main part of it would be a only little taller than I am. However, on top of that, there’s a tall vase with some aquatic tchotchkes (colourful, large seashells and what look like corals) at the base of the vase.

The cabinet has myriad drawers, drawers within drawers, and cupboards that hold all manner of things, including jewellery, religious items, grooming tools, playing cards, art pieces, and more. According to the guide, when it was full, it held more than 1,000 items. Some of those items—about one-third, according to the guide—are now displayed in cases along the walls behind the Augsburg Art Cabinet.

The guide said that back in the day, it was believed that humans were the only species that could know everything about everything and art cabinets were intended to represent that. The guide went on to explain that, of course, today we don’t believe that humans can know everything about everything.

I’ll go further. Reading the news about all of the wild conspiracies and broader misinformation that gets mass-circulated and fervently believed, I’m beginning to think that, not only do we not know everything about everything, but we’re starting to regress to the Dark Ages.

Harrumph! But, enough about that.

Harrumph.

I said, Enough about that. Harum… I said, Let’s move on!

The guide then took us to the Anatomical Theatre. It and the Art Cabinet are probably the two most-noted parts of the Museum Gustavianum. Dissections were performed in the Anatomical Theatre, mostly on non-human animals, but there were also ten human autopsies recorded as having been performed there in the one hundred years that it was in operation.

The room is stunning. It’s constructed entirely in wood, but the architectural elements of the viewing tiers are painted to look like marble.

There was one row of benches on the same level as the dissecting table. There were then about a half-dozen steeply raked tiers with standing room only.

Filled, there was room for 200 people to attend a dissection. In addition to allowing students to view the proceedings, the university also sold tickets to the general public. Some dissections, particularly the human ones, sold out. The university stopped the practice, in part because the dissections had shifted from being science and education to being macabre entertainment.

Above the viewing tiers, two parallel rows of windows circle the theatre. Above that, there’s a peaked dome. According to the guide, above the viewing tiers, the theatre is all the original construction. However, the tiers have been reconstructed much more recently using original materials as much as possible, and following the original architectural drawings.

Another small room in the Gustavianum Museum held an ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome collection with the usual type of antiquities from those regions. Plus, there was a small room with some very old coins.

The Gustavianum Museum made for a splendid way to fill in the morning until lunch, where I checked off one of the requirements of this trip: Swedish meatballs. They were tasty and came with gravy, some nice mashed potatoes, what I think was roe of some kind or roe, and I forget what else. But they were meatballs. They were Swedish. What more can you say?

I’ll fill you in later on what I did this afternoon, unless you visited this journal after I posted that and read it first, in which case, I filled you in earlier. I hope that doesn’t cause a rift in time.