My last post was sad, so I think we need a happy post to balance it, so here’s a throwback to my visit to Europe in 2023. One of the things I was told by Swedish friends in New Zealand that I absolutely must do whilst in Stockholm was to go to Skansen.
Luckily Elisa fully agreed with them!
Skansen is the world’s oldest open air museum. It helped inspire places like Colonial Williamsburg, and is so iconic that ‘skansen’ is literally the word for an open air museum in Czech.
It features buildings from different eras from all across Sweden. Some of the buildings are only viewable from the outside, but other are open on some days, so you can go inside.
The open buildings have docents in clothes matching the era and type of building doing work in keeping with the building. All of the docents had a particular interest and expertise related to the building and its purpose. It was fabulous. Nerdling that I am I asked the hosts 18 gazillion questions.
Here’s some of what I saw:
An 18th century milestone (literally!) and a tall wooden belfry built in 1732-33
The belfry has been coated with tar coloured red with falu red pigment. The tar helps preserve the wood, and the red is more attractive than the standard tar colour.
A storehouse for food. What really struck me about this is how many similarities there are between this style of storehouse, and traditional Māori storehouses.
The High Loft and the New Loft, in ‘National Romantic’ style:
The first building we got to go in was the apothecary, and what a corker of a place to start!
It featured a taxidermy crocodile (I think it’s actually a caiman), without which no 18th century Swedish apothecary was complete!
The docent host portrayed the apothecary’s wife, as women weren’t allowed to be apothecaries in their own right. However, as most apothecaries were family businesses, it’s likely the wives did lots of dispensing and helping.
She had some 18th century apothecary mixes for us to smell. Notice that the expectorant is ‘sin opium’ (without opium).
Look at the gorgeous tile stove! And all those beautiful bottles and drawers!
In the next room was equipment for distilling tinctures, drafting draughts and pulverising powders (tiny attempt at a Swedish pun – powder is ‘pulver’ in Swedish).
In the final room was the apothecary’s apprentice, busy making pastils in the 18th century manner:
His pastils were made from clay, to imitate the texture of an 18th century pastil without including any of the real ingredients, mummy powder having (thankfully!) fallen out of favour as a medicine.
In addition to buildings, the grounds of Skansen were full of plants & gardens specific to different areas and eras:
And the ubiquitous and inevitable Canadian geese, those repositories of all the anger and rudeness that got drained out of the Canadian people:
(ETA: turns out they are barnacle geese! See second photo & comments. However, I’m leaving the Canadian geese comment, because people enjoyed it and there are/were Canadian geese at Skansen, just not in these photos)
The next stop was a modest 19th century farmhouse:
Inside I got to try turnip for the first time (you don’t get a lot of turnips in Hawai’i!), and had a fascinating discussion with the docents about living history and culture.
Check out these double-decker curtained beds, helpful for keeping snug in the Swedish winter:
And these cunning birch shoes:
On the recommendation of the hosts in this house we headed off to the ladies summer house for cheesemaking:
It’s the ladies summer house because in some parts of Sweden it was the job of the unmarried women to take the cows up the mountains to their summer grazing lands, and to make cheese and butter while having a (hopefully lovely) women’s only retreat.
They were making mesost or messmör, a caramelised whey cheese. I did not get the to try the cheese, but Elisa offered to buy some for me, with the warning that she didn’t care for the type personally, and the closest description she could give of it was ‘peanut butter cheese’.
Having finally had the opportunity to try brunost (the Norwegian style of whey cheese) this year, I can see what she meant. I liked it, but it also completely confused my brain, which felt that cheese should not be sweet and peanut butter-y. As long as I thought of it as ‘caramelised reduced dairy spread’ my brain agreed it was delicious.
Then, past the manor house, and on to more food! Only this time we didn’t get to eat it, just admire:
The manor house kitchen house had a spread of 18th century food of the type that might have been served at the manor house. I hope someone got to eat some of this because it looks delicious!
The kitchen house also had the servants quarters:
And a dining room with the most amazing hand-painted wallpaper:
From food, to finery. We went up an exciting set of death stairs to see a jeweller at work.
And that’s only 1/8th of what we saw. What a fabulous day!
