Yet another pagan burial site

The Bishop-controller battery

 Uppsala - sabbatical 2, week 5

We primarily rented a car in order to be able to go see Yolanda's Aunt Saara, who still lives on her farm outside Uppsala.  One day was mostly taken up with this visit; Yolanda's cousin Kristine and her daughter Josephine were also able to attend.

The rest of the time was spent touring some of the sites of this old Swedish city.  Its fortunes have ebbed and flowed, sometimes in conjunction with the religious upheavals of the country as Uppsala (both versions - see below) was an important ecclesiastical town.  Its university, for example, is the oldest in Sweden, but the city suffered decline during the Swedish Reformation when the crown confiscated Roman Catholic lands and funds (and naturally sent the wealth to Stockholm).  Thus, we have the curious site of a bastion in the city castle's fortifications built to command the cathedral - the Bastion Styrbiskop - literally the "Bishop-Controller".

Moving back in time are the iron-age burial mounds (the "Royal Mounds") in Gamla Uppsala ("Old" Uppsala).  Once the largest town in the region and a pagan religious centre before it was a Christian religious centre, its people (and bishop) largely migrated to Östra Aros when the river became unnavigable.  The Pope, perhaps finding it too inconvenient to change his address book, ordered that the town of Östra Aros be renamed Uppsala, and thus we have "Gamla Uppsala" a few kilometres down the road from plain "Uppsala".  Interestingly, the church in Gamla Uppsala contains a runestone incorporated into the wall commemorating the locals' conversion to Christianity.  Another interesting tidbit: the church is literally half a cathedral - half was torn down when the bishop moved to Östra Aros; the part that wasn't torn down was re-enclosed to become the parish church.

One of the Royal Mounds

And of course, being scientists, we had to pay homage to Carl Linnaeus, popularizer and formalizer of the binomial Latin names for organisms still used today.  This excellent specimen of H. sapiens is interred in Uppsala Cathedral (near the entrance, on the left side facing the alter). His "estate" is also preserved as a park/tourist attraction, about half-way between Aunt Saara's and Uppsala.