Tales from a Little Town on Lake Vättern
Vadstena (Om människor och miljöer i en liten stad vid en stor sjö)
by Magnus Engberg
- Bokförlaget Arena, 2000
- Summary translated by Ken Schubert
- (Translation appears in the book and has approved for the Internet by the author)
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The town stands between plain and lake, a silhouette of towers and pinnacles, treetops and roofs. To the west it bares itself for waves and blustery winds. On the other three sides it is surrounded by plot upon plot of rich farmland.
Above it all, the vault of the sky tirelessly shuffles the seasons.
Summer’s sun warms people and crops, watches over boats, rye and rape, until the winds of autumn sweep in to pillage the lake and dispatch shadow-like, uneasy clouds over newly harvested fields. Wild geese zigzag across the sky in screeching columns, the rains replenish the furrows behind the ploughs. Crows and jackdaws take off and land over barren terrains like thick particles of soot.
Then the silence descends. The winter smoothes its blanket over hearth and field, the ice edges above the pier, and the wind twists its way between the houses, piling up snowdrifts that will soon dissolve and evaporate into the mist. Gradually the light returns, and then the colours – white lilies on green grass, purple lilacs on yellow fields of rape. The lake reclaims its blue birthright.
The town beckons from far and near. The roads and junctions etch the plain like veins and capillaries. Long before approaching, the visitor glimpses the towers that reach for the sky, the baroque dome of Vasa Castle, and the church’s slender roof turret – a thumb and a little finger pointing to the gods.
Once your field of vision has contracted, what emerges are lush parks, old stone walls, narrow streets and alleys – lined with roses and overlooked by windows that flaunt geraniums and mirrors. Time to slow down – there is no sense of urgency in this little town on the big lake.
AUTUMN BLUES
Vadstena is often silent and languid. Especially when the mist shrouds the landmarks in the hiatus between summer tourists and the elves of winter; you can almost feel the hand of St. Bridget glide over the rooftops. The spectrum
deepens, as in the habits of the Brigittines – grey and black with inflections of white and red.
At the majestic abbey, the flowers of spring have come and gone. Light filters through the lofty windows, the brass chandeliers glisten. Sacred and profane merge – venerable wooden icons and merchants’ tombstones. The headstrong Duke Magnus, King Gustav Vasa’s youngest and mentally disturbed son, rests peacefully in stone on his sarcophagus. An occasional latter-day pilgrim hastens by his feet on her quest for holier artefacts.
Is that the saint’s head you glimpse under the lid of the shrine – or perhaps the remains of her daughter Katarina, the first abbess?
The Folkunga Palace, built by Regent Birger Jarl in the i3th century and given to Birgitta Birgersdotter (the future St. Bridget) a hundred years later to found a convent, turns its frozen brick countenance to the lake. Protected by the silence beneath arches that are set off by narrow dormer windows, the visitor can conjure up the blast of a bugle at a royal feast or the praying of nuns in their cells. In the chamber where Birgitta is said to have had her first revelation, you can still see her in your mind’s eye reciting the Pater Noster. There is the coffer in which her remains were returned home after she had breathed her last breath in Rome.
Between the shop windows on Main Street, the shadows lengthen. Colourful short-sleeve shirts have given way to a drabber style. A sign in one window advertises ‘Vadstena lace’, the town’s most well known traditional craft. with only a thin pane shielding them from wind and storm, the intricate borders seem delicate as spider webs.
Along the lakeside promenade, where children can swim ‘in the middle of town’, the boats have been pulled up to shore. The panorama over the water has assumed a solemn demeanour. Awaiting the ice and winter slumber, the lake breathes long and deeply.
Naddö – where poet laureate and Nobel Prize winner Verner von Heidenstam grappled with his pen – peeks out across the bay. As he sat in his study, his gaze and imagination wandered over the countryside and its eventful history. When he moved away in 1918, his manor was torn down to make way for a new one. Poised on a wind-blown promontory, it glimmers white through an opening in the trees.
Now that the summer sun has left off taunting its elegant Renaissance facade, the castle has regained its dignity. In 1552, an ageing Gustav Vasa made 17-year-old Katarina Stenbock his third wife and queen inside its walls, long before they had reached their ultimate height. when his daughter Cecilia succumbed to the wiles of the ‘wrong’ suitor seven years later, her half-brother Prince Erik made sure that the sinners were punished, especially the daring lover, a count from Ostfriesland. ‘The Great Vadstena Uproar’ became a hot item of gossip in society; at least among those who weren’t affected.
As the decades passed, the castle grew larger. Even the unsentimental King Karl XII must have been taken in by its monumental charm when, while preparing for his fateful Norwegian campaign, he crossed the lake in 1716 to visit his sister Ulrika Eleonora. The queen-to-be had turned the castle into her temporary headquarters.
The poster for the summer exhibition has already faded outside the gates. In the spacious ‘wedding hall’, you can still hear the dying applause after the sopranos had fallen silent and the curtain descended on this year’s opera performance by the Vadstena Academy.
A single swan glides undisturbed across the moat – the high-powered private boats have long since departed from the guest harbour. The old white passenger boats, which still frequent the Göta Cross Country Canal and have been showing up at the pier for a good deal longer, will not return until May. A few craft left there for the winter will soon be jostled by the first crunch of ice. The tables and canopies of the outdoor cafes are safely stowed away. Yellow leaves wither in the holes at the miniature golf course. The phone booth is abandoned. Pervading it all is a very welcome and intimate remoteness.
Vadstena is a silent and languid town – in the hiatus between summer tourists and the elves of winter.
THE MENTAL ASYLUM
Vadstena has often captured the imagination of historians. The story hasn’t always been easy to write – myth and reality may be two different things.
Beyond dispute is that the sick have been cared for here since the first Healing House was established way back in the 15th century. Although the patients were originally the sole concern of the convent, private interests soon saw to it that the monopoly was broken. Mårten Nilsson Skinnare, a rich and God-fearing businessman who enjoyed the respect of his fellow citizens, helped construct a chapel in deference to those who needed both bodily and spiritual healing.
In enshrining his righteousness by donating a piece of land he had been leasing from the powerful convent, he was no doubt seeking balm for his own soul as well. What he so ‘generously’ declined was to eventually host one of Sweden’s biggest mental asylums.
Once the Reformation had swept away the convent’s power and King Gustav Vasa had ‘requisitioned’ its riches, the Mårten Skinnare Foundation was run in a more secular, centralised manner. Its founder was shuffled out of the way. After he had taken part in a 1529 rebellion against the king aimed at restoring the old ecclesiastical order; he was stripped of all influence at his institution. However; he was permitted to continue living there with the promise of ‘free bread’ for the rest of his life.
Skinnare died in 1543 – according to tradition in the house that still boasts his name and what was apparently his facilities. Duke Karl, one of Gustav Vasa’s sons and the fixture King Karl IX, chased out the remaining nuns in the late i6th century and closed the convent. The asylum, on the other hand, was destined to survive both the stringency of the nuns and royal decrees. A survivor as well, Skinnare’s house unapologetically flaunts one of the popular and frequently photographed points of interest – what innumerable tourists and schoolchildren have dubbed ‘the toilet’.
With time, Skinnare’s donation and foundation proved inadequate, despite several renovation projects. As a result, the ageing convent was occupied once again, this time by women upon whom powers other than the purely divine had been conferred. The Brigittines’ dormitory gave way for asylum corridors, the cells remained cells. Their occupants had very many successors – the last ones didn’t move out until 1952.
A new asylum was built in the mid-19th century. From the enclosed courtyard, it felt as though only the road to heaven was still open. At one end stood the asylum chapel and at the other the stern grey abbey church. High walls and the houses of the Lord admonished people to sobriety in the face of their destiny.
Adjacent to Skinnare’s presumed house is now a little museum dedicated to the history of the asylum. The exhibits give pause for reflection. The revolving chair, the long bath, the surprise bath, a narrow, dirty cell: there were many methods for subduing a maniac.
The old courtyard hasn’t changed, its shaft just as deep and its walls just as mute as even During the school year, the students at Vadstena College crowd the old asylum corridors on their way to class. In the summertime the Vadstena Academy takes oven Instead of patient journals, lesson plans and rehearsal schedules are now being kept.
However, mental patients were there as late as the 1980s. At that point the old sections had long been a part of the huge facility to which St. Bridget had bequeathed her name. Even the new ‘Bridget Asylum’, nearly an entire neighbourhood, had grown old. A ‘healthcare reform’ was soon to empty most of its rooms and corridors, making way for civil servants, high school students, a day-care centre …
SHORT ON ARSENIC BUT PLENTY OF OLD LACE
Vadstena has relatively little crime. Of course, sensational scandals have shaken its residents now and again, but local storytellers relish them as a natural ingredient of its small town charm.
Violence, however; has never been Vadstena’s hallmark. The Angel of Death has generally been a courteous visitor. If not an unknown substance, arsenic has almost certainly never been used for more drastic purposes than eliminating particularly impudent rats.
So much the better for old lace! Generations of nimble fingers have made impressive quantities of the much sought-after Vadstena variety. This very special handicraft is an oft-related chapter in the history of the town.
No one can say for sure how it all started.
The roots of the tradition may lie among the craftsmen who followed the royal court and supplied it with items of luxury
However, there is no disputing the fact that lace was made in the former convent.
Once the last of the Brigittines were run out in 1595, their message of peace also faded into history. Off in faraway places, Martin Luther’s Swedish disciples fought every bit as much for ‘the right doctrine’ as for king and country Meanwhile, they lost no opportunity to plunder riches and seize territory for the expanding Swedish state. In Vadstena, the convent stood empty and deserted.
Shaken and homeless soldiers needed a safe haven in their own country. Following several royal decrees and parliamentary speechifying about money, the convent was reopened as the Vadstena Soldier’s Home in 1647, a sanctuary for ‘soldiers who are crippled, deranged or incapacitated by age’. Those who still had a family could bring it along. These men came to be known as the ‘Gratialists’ (the wards of grace). Well into the 1780s, they arrived from battlefields and prison camps to grow old in Vadstena.
Estates and farms seized by the Crown were used to demonstrate royal beneficence. Beyond the far banks of the Vättern, peasants toiled away to produce the barrels of corn, pots of beans and joints of meat that were allocated to the boarders at the Soldier’s Home, according to rank and grade.
The state’s dole was secure but limited. Once you reached puberty, you were expected to work for your sustenance. Similarly, a newly widowed woman lived close to the edge. Before she knew it, she could find herself with neither food nor a roof over her head. Her salvation was to remarry another war invalid, perhaps a recent widower who needed someone to keep house. Clever women managed to walk down the aisle several times before being lowered into the grave.
Many ex-soldiers had no choice but to find an extra source of income. Some
tried to compete with the town’s tradesmen, while others placed themselves at the service of the local authorities. Nonetheless, the ability of the Soldier’s Home to serve as a labour pool was limited by its inhabitants’ physical infirmities and lack of mobility.
Eyes and hands might be spared in a battle that left a man incapable of much else. A Stockholm city councilman who came for a visit in 1781 reported catching sight of ‘a bunch of middle-aged men and women, as well as boys and girls, sitting on the front steps and making lace to be sold throughout the country’.
In other words, women were not the only people deft enough to practise the craft, and more than one scarred war veteran could be seen hunched over a lace pillow. The same hands that had extinguished the life of a strapping Russian soldier amidst the gunpowder smoke of Poltava now guided the slender thread through a labyrinthine pattern as if still obeying his commander’s orders. The most elegant bodice of a Vadstena matron may have been made by the gnarled fingers of a man whose thoughts lingered on faraway battlefields.
The Soldier’s Home was closed down in due time, but the lace making continued, and even spread to the surrounding villages. New patterns were drawn for the growing ranks of skilled female practitioners. Merchants of the handicraft also grew in numbers and agility. Hardy ‘lace rovers’ rambled over long stretches. The market expanded. Vadstena lace soon started showing up far beyond the town’s borders. All the way to Paris it went, to be shown at two World Fairs – 1855 and 1900. Something that would certainly have exceeded the wildest imaginings of the Soldier Home’s ‘wards of grace’.
In the cemetery outside the church of the convent is a stone on which are engraved a triple crown and a sword. The eulogy reads: ‘Here lie Gratialists from the Vadstena Soldier’s Home and war veterans brought back from Poltava.’ The sturdy trees add even greater solemnity to the boulders and gravestones that bring to mind other lives long since passed.
But they aren’t the only memorials. Over the entrance to a building that has been royal palace, convent, and home for old warriors is a panoply of what was once the latest weaponry. Even after having escaped the battlefield, the soldiers must be reminded of their fateful deeds. Representations of sword and lance, cannon and cannonball crowd each other out just as their real-life counterparts had once done. It can hardly have provided inspiration to a lace maker, this masterpiece of a stone mason’s apprentice.
ST. BRIDGET’ S LATTER-DAY SUCCESSORS
At the lake’s edge, the guest house of the Brigittines turns its pale yellow countenance to wind and wave. The building was designed around the time of World War I at the request of an estate owner beyond the plain whose wife had wearied of the monotony of country life. Named Strandgården – ‘the Shore Court’ – it won the instant approval of architectural experts.
Art Professor and Vadstena authority Andreas Lindblom waxed enthusiastic in his ‘review’ of this newcomer to the town’s architectural treasure. His praise of Strandgården as a model for future town planners may seem odd to the contemporary observer – the most celebrated innovation eventually becomes antiquated. But in a town that has never had to suffer either growing pains or demolition mania, his thoughts are timeless:
In itself Strandgården is no earth-shattering work of modern architecture. But with its location in an old, relatively undisturbed town and its fragile quality of being the citizenry’s final outpost at the edge of the convent, it has come to serve a genuine function. It is an important step toward the modern, but nevertheless conscious and reverential, construction that our old towns so badly need.’
Vadstena remains a town of human dimensions, deliberately designed, with buildings that are rarely higher than two storeys.
Not quite two decades after opening, Strandgården acquired new owners. The house and garden became a haven for work and meditation. The silence was occasionally broken by hushed foreign tones. Built originally for more mundane purposes, it was now to give women ‘who feel called upon to serve God in both the active and contemplative life an opportunity to help those in need through deeds of charity combined with prayer and meditation’.
Nearly 350 years had passed since the Brigittines had been expelled by Duke Karl’s lackeys. Now they returned as modern-day lay sisters. Once again the town obtained an international flavour and a lovely retreat, a convent open to the laity as well. Besides prayer and meditation, the women’s primary chore was caring for the building, grounds and guests.
Twenty years after this transformation, Strandgården was expanded to include both choir and chapel. Eventually the Brigittines joined their convent to a new church, whose roof has become an equally recognisable part of the town’s ‘skyline’ as seen from the lake. Holding regular vespers, it constitutes a kind of global presence outside the walls of the sanctuary.
GARDEN OF EDEN
Sweden’s first known gardener was a man by the name of Johan Päterson. He had been a member of Birgitta’s guard in Rome – even a future saint could use protection. When his patroness died, he returned home to plant and cultivate the garden at her Vadstena convent. His assignment was to provide a glimpse of God’s paradise from a little spot on earth.
The fruits of his efforts were to offer healing and relief, rejuvenation and pleasing fragrances. In other words, a little Garden of Eden for the inhabitants of the convent, a spot for quite walks and silent meditation shielded from the world’s clamour.
He might have felt at home in today’s miniature paradise as well.
By the old stone edifice of the church, a flower and spice garden has been planted – a horticultural link between present and past. The peace is pervasive. There’s a place for almost everyone here, though mainly for the meek and gentle.
But a meticulously cultivated garden encompasses more than mere innocence. Amidst the lovely and aromatic plants are some whose markers bear a skull and cross-bones. Appearances can be just as deceiving in paradise as within the gates and well-trimmed hedges of human abodes. The most enticing flower may turn out to be perilous at closer quarters.
No tree reaches all the way to heaven, not even in the best-fertilised garden. Despite modern cultivation techniques, it still takes a long time to become a ‘proper’ resident of Vadstena. Time does not always take into consideration the changes it has fostered, and local history has its own perspective. The little world can expand on an enormous scale while the big world shrinks to near invisibility. In the words of the master of both tragedy and comedy, there may be ‘mach ado about nothing’. Once the storm has died down, a pleasant breeze nearly always returns. As long as open secrets remain open, the sense of affinity grows. Just like in the blessed garden of the Lord, nobody needs to fear anything, as long as it is adequately marked.
The gardener in the old convent thrived amongst his plots. Undisturbed by the weeds outside, he could peacefully devote himself to this terrestrial wing of heavenly paradise. The convent wall no longer isolates, and the modern-day garden has become a little oasis, shielded only by a flimsy fence in an endless universe.
ON PARKS AND TRAINS
The town’s greenery is also a big part of its soul. The singing of birds and rustling of leaves lend counterpoint to the entire symphony. Laden with tradition, Harbour Park offers both the fragrance of flowers and a panoramic view of the lake. The arrival of spring is celebrated here with a crackling May Day bonfire and a male choir For one evening at least, all quarrels are forgotten and the future is bright. As fireworks fill the skies of Vadstena, dusk descends over the lake and the horizon reddens, even a passing visitor feels like a native.
The park has also been the place to come and catch a glimpse of Swedish royalty, especially when they would arrive by boat. Stepping off the pier in 1896, King Oscar II made his grand entrance through an elegant triumphal arch specially designed for the occasion. His subjects, matrons of the town I peasant boys alike, crowded around him. Flags waved everywhere and ‘Two peoples, one welfare’ – a reference to the Swedish-Norwegian union was still the royal motto.
If the king had come by train instead, he would have got off at the station that remains standing in the southern part of town. The shutters of the ticket window in the waiting room have long since been lowered for the last time. Silence reigns, no timetable is in sight. You won’t get anyplace by waiting here – at least not for a train.
But out on the platform you’re taken aback by train cars that stand motionless on the track – in Vadstena even the railroad has been archived! There’s a little rail museum here as well, with local memorabilia.
If the train has stopped forever, there are still taxis and buses to whisk you away. In recent years, however; the museum has reconstructed a tourist train it will take you back and forth across the plain on the straight and increasingly invisible tracks.
On the other hand, there; no hurry to leave. Linger for a while, sink into the town’s enchanting harmony. From your seat in Vadstena’s make-believe choo-choo, you can dream of faraway places. And every now and again, there’s an incurably restless soul that finds its way to the edge of town and allows its longing to merge with the exquisite panorama …
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