Vasa Museum

Few objects anywhere carry the seventeenth century so completely into the present as the Swedish warship Vasa. She was built in Stockholm for King Gustavus Adolphus in 1626–1627, under the shipwright Henrik Hybertsson and, after he fell ill, his successor Hein Jacobsson. On 10 August 1628 she set out on her maiden voyage, heeled over in a gust after little more than a kilometre, took water through her open lower gunports and sank within minutes in the harbour, with the loss of around thirty lives. The ship meant to announce Sweden's power in the Baltic never left the city.

She lay 32 metres down in the harbour mud for 333 years, and it kept her remarkably whole. The wreck was located in 1956 by the amateur researcher Anders Franzén, raised in 1961 after divers spent two years digging tunnels beneath the hull for lifting cables, and then sprayed with polyethylene glycol for seventeen years before a long, slow drying. The result is a hull whose woodwork is overwhelmingly original, standing on its own keel inside a purpose-built hall on Djurgården that opened in 1990 and has drawn tens of millions of visitors since.

What rewards a slow look is the carving. Vasa carried some five hundred sculptures in oak, pine and lime: lions, a line of Roman emperors, mermaids, wild men, sea monsters and Tritons in the Dutch grotesque manner, crowded onto the high stern and the beakhead, all once painted in strong colours on red grounds and touched with gold. Today the wood is dark, and it takes some imagination to picture how loud and bright the ship looked on the day she sailed. Walk the levels around the hull to see the two gun decks that were meant to hold 64 guns, the ranks of gunports, the rigging of the lower masts, and the sheer height of the upper hull, built too tall and too heavy for the little that sat below the waterline.

The galleries around the hull also turn to the people aboard and the society that built her: the remains of crew members found in the wreck, and the objects that went down with them, tell a story of an ordinary working day that ended in disaster in full view of the city. The hall is held at a steady cool temperature and humidity to protect the timber, which lends the enormous dark shape an almost cathedral-like stillness.

Getting there

The Vasa Museum stands on Djurgården, about 1.3 km from the Östermalm district of central Stockholm, at Galärvarvsvägen 14. Stockholm Bromma Airport (BMA) is about 9 km away. From the city centre, tram 7 runs to the Nordiska museet/Vasa stop in around fifteen minutes; the year-round Djurgården ferry from Slussen stops at Allmänna gränd, roughly eight minutes' walk from the museum. On foot it is 20–30 minutes from the centre along Strandvägen and across Djurgårdsbron.