Stockholm
“that peculiar lonliness that comes from knowing and seeing a lot that you can’t do much about…….”
A Stroll Through Gamla Stan
There is a moment, stepping off the bridge onto the island of Stadsholmen, when you realise that Gamla Stan is not so much a neighbourhood as a medieval theme park that achieved sentience sometime around 1350 and has been quietly fleecing visitors ever since. The buildings lean together over the cobbles like gossiping aunts, painted in the ochres and rusts and mustards of a place that has never once experienced direct sunlight, and the whole effect is so impossibly, criminally picturesque that you find yourself forgiving the eleven-euro coffee before you've even ordered it. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the best-preserved old towns in Europe, which is to say it is a labyrinth designed by people who actively wished you to become lost, hungry, and faintly anxious — which, coincidentally, is the founding emotional condition of every Swede ever committed to print.
Take the alleyways. Mårten Trotzigs gränd, the narrowest of them all, tapers to a heroic ninety centimetres, which means you traverse it sideways, exhaling, like a man trying to leave a party without being noticed. It was here, wedged between two slabs of seventeenth-century masonry, that I encountered a tall, grey, dyspeptic gentleman pressing a hand to his stomach and gazing at the cobbles with the expression of someone who has personally witnessed the worst of humanity and suspects lunch will not improve matters. This was Inspector Martin Beck, who informed me, unprompted, that he felt seasick despite our being on solid ground and several metres above sea level. I assured him this was normal in Gamla Stan. He did not look reassured. He never does.
Stortorget, the main square, is the postcard you have already seen: a tidy huddle of gabled houses in colours a child would choose, ringed by cafés and a Nobel Museum that very politely declines to mention that this exact square once ran ankle-deep with the blood of some ninety beheaded noblemen during the Stockholm Bloodbath of 1520. The Swedes have a marvellous gift for this — for laying a cinnamon-bun veneer over a history of really quite spectacular violence — and nowhere is the cognitive whiplash sharper than in the gift shops, where you may purchase a plush Viking, a horned helmet (historically a lie), and a Dala horse the size of a labrador, all while standing on the site of a state-sanctioned massacre.
The genius of Stockholm, of course, is fika, the sacred institution whereby an entire nation downs tools twice daily to consume coffee and pastry with a seriousness other cultures reserve for childbirth, and Gamla Stan does fika with a vengeance. In one cramped café I watched a rumpled, handsome journalist nurse his fourth coffee of the morning while staring at a notebook as though it owed him money — Mikael Blomkvist, who is incapable of solving anything without first ingesting his own body weight in caffeine. Two tables over sat a small, ferociously still young woman in black, eating a microwaved Billy's Pan Pizza she had evidently smuggled in, headphones on, repelling all human contact with the quiet efficiency of a cattle grid. Lisbeth Salander did not look up. Lisbeth Salander never looks up. She had, I later suspected, already hacked the café's till and knew precisely how much they were overcharging me.
Up the hill looms the Royal Palace, a building so enormous and so beige that the changing of the guard takes on the quality of watching paint guard other paint, and it is here, in the gravitational pull of Swedish officialdom, that the island's deeper melancholy declares itself. For all its kanelbullar and its fairy-tale frontages, this is a country that has known its tragedies acutely — one thinks, walking these streets at dusk, of Olof Palme, the prime minister gunned down on a central Stockholm pavement in 1986 while walking home from the cinema without bodyguards, in a case the nation has never fully solved or recovered from. There is something about Gamla Stan in the blue half-light that holds that memory: the openness, the unguarded ordinariness, the sense of a society that trusted itself a little too much and paid for it.
By evening you will be footsore, lighter of wallet, and faintly perfumed with pickled herring, that Swedish delicacy which manages to be both a national treasure and a hostage situation for the palate. You will have been overcharged, gently lost, and stared at by a hacker; you will have watched a detective look ill and a journalist look caffeinated; and you will, despite every rational objection, want to come back. That is the trick of the place. Gamla Stan is too expensive, too crowded, too aggressively quaint, and built on a foundation of decapitated aristocrats — and it is, all the same, completely wonderful. Pack a coat and a forensic accountant, and go anyway.
