Isle of Summer Solitude
The only sound is a slight rustle of breeze when you ride a bicycle three miles down a farmland lane in 72-degree weather past old stone farm buildings set off by 10-foot lilacs in such profusion that a world-class nursery salesman must have come by a century ago with excess inventory. Local farmers evidently snapped them up at the Saturday market in town as if they were fresh eggs.Turn down another lane. In Vamlingbo, you'll find a thatch-roof barn, more lilacs, and a three-table bakery café in the farmyard offering saffron pancakes and strong Swedish coffee, a mid-morning tradition known as “fika.” Nearby is a 700-year-old church whose walls are two-foot-thick stone. They bear evocative murals that depict saints, sinners, and the thread that binds us all. In one, the Archangel Michael renders judgment on the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II, who departed this world in 1024. It’s a history pamphlet, except Henry’s celestial fate remains unknown to earthly artists.
In the pine forests a few miles away, charming endemic Gotland ponies cluster like sturdy ghosts in the amber-light-netted woods. Hayfields are a riot of early summer poppies, and ivory-shafted birches bound the fields like whitewashed pickets. Look closely in the shadows of sturdy oaks and you'll find standing stones, 1,000-year-old tablets whose runes might represent neighborhood gossip, or be princely declamations. No dueling, perhaps.
You can bike along a smooth asphalt back lane for an hour and see no cars.
You can stroll a flower-strewn shoreline as the Baltic’s gentle ripples tap the silver sand like tambourines.
Daylight lasts past 11 p.m. and returns at 3 a.m., and it’s a glistening, crystalline, comforting light.
Seagulls call and nightbirds, with little nighttime, sing all day.
“Think we'll ever see a car?” I asked my biking companion.
It was a rhetorical question: We had seen only two.
Paradise for Tactics and Trade
Who wouldn’t covet this ethereally pastoral Eden? Peer closely at the human landscape, and you'll find Gotland’s great beauty and serene farmland aren’t the sole sources of its significance, not thousands of years ago and not now.This island is in the middle of the Baltic Sea.
To the west is Sweden, the now neutral but once warlike nation that has mostly held Gotland for half a millennium. It’s a 40-minute plane flight from Stockholm and three hours by ferry from Nynashamn.
Not far away lies Denmark, a once-covetous kingdom that took Gotland in 1361, but let it lapse into a pirate stronghold. Sweden got it back in the 18th century, only to lose it briefly in 1808 to another covetous northern European kingdom, Russia. Sweden got it back about a month later, and so it has stayed ever since.
Why all this covetousness? It’s not just because the island is surpassingly gorgeous. There’s only one conspicuous stand-alone piece of land in the Baltic Sea. Yep, Gotland.
That’s why, having hiked uphill in Visby, Gotland’s capital, the most sensational viewpoints are old tall stone watchtowers that were put there for defensive purposes. This vantage commands a harbor and attendant sea lanes that were crucial to human commerce centuries ago.
Visby was a key port and political center in the Hanseatic League, the Baltic’s answer to Venice’s hegemony in the Mediterranean. Its prosperity was profound: Visby’s history museum holds the 1,200-year-old Spillings Hoard, the single largest Viking silver treasure ever found: 14,300 coins and 286 bracelets and baubles, totaling 148 pounds of sterling. The coins’ provenance reveals the island’s trade history—almost all the coins are Persian or Byzantine.
Today’s Gotland is no less potentially significant than 1,200 years ago, when Viking galleys rowed past on their way to invade Russia. Hold Gotland, and you overlook all four quadrants of the Baltic.
Ancient yet Simple
On coastal heaths clothed in mist, you'll find monumental neolithic heaps of stone, piled up like a million cannonballs, that still baffle archeologists. Were they ceremonial? Probably not: Gotland has many very different so-called ship settings, the Viking graveyards inside which chieftains were buried. It’s more likely that the massive stone piles were watch-hills for signal beacons that were set alight when, say, a Danish armada was approaching. People have lived there for at least 7,000 years, but after all that time, there are still barely 60,000 residents.They make the most of their island: I was spreading rich golden Swedish butter on a slice of still-warm bread at a local restaurant far out in the countryside. When I asked why it was so good, the baker beckoned me to the back door, which she opened to indicate a spring-green field of grain. It was heirloom spelt—ancient wheat.
“As old as the Spillings treasure?” I ask.
She nods amiably.
“Oh, much older,” she said.
Climb a stone cairn, and you see peace and serenity ... for a long, long way, into the distance and into the past. No Viking galleys, no clipper ships, no aircraft carriers. I prefer to focus on the windmills and pines, sheep and poppies, birches, and standing stones. History and beauty have many forms in our complex world, and a peacefully paradoxical place like Gotland is rare indeed.
