August 8 Gammelstad (Day 316)
Going a little further afield today, we caught a bus to travel the 10km (about 6 miles) to Gammelstad Church Town, which harkens back a thousand years! At that time the area consisted of a group of islands where the sea level was about 32 feet higher than it is today! As the Viking Age ended in about the year 1050 and Vikings became Christianized a parish was established in this northern reach of what was to become Sweden. By the 1300’s this area was part of a border dispute with Russia so the Swedish state set about securing the area by settlement and establishing churches. A large stone church was built in the 1400’s and by 1621 the town known as Lulea was founded, sustained by fishing and fur trading. By the mid 1600’s geologic uplift over time had rendered the harbor too shallow to continue trade by watercraft and the town had to be moved nearer the coast, the present location of Lulea. But the large stone church stayed put! Because of the scattered nature of the population, farmers living and tending fields far from the marketplace in town, and the duty imposed on the population to attend church regularly, most citizens built small cottages closer to the church where they could stay overnight or during church festivals. When the town was moved, and the Church stayed, so did the cottages and the tradition of coming to church and staying for brief periods of time in your cottage. Thus the “Church Town” came into being. There were originally 71 Swedish Church Towns scattered around the country. Gammelstad is the largest and best preserved of the 16 remaining.
The Nederlulea church is believed to have been finished in 1492!
While the exterior looks rather plain, it has a very rich interior and furnishings!
The pulpit dates from the early 1700’s.
The much more modest cottages radiate out on grassy or paved lanes from the central church. There are 404 cottages remaining in the church town and all are required to be painted in red and white only. There are many regulations regarding their use and maintenance, although they are no longer required to be owned exclusively by parishoners.
The interior of this cottage is on display and outfitted circa 1800’s. Most cottage owners would leave their finer “going-to-church” clothes at the cottage and actually welcomed the holidays and social aspect of their imposed ‘church-going’, being a break from the toils of farming!
Cottage owners built their own cottages and a clue to a farmers prosperity could be gleaned from the state of his cottage! Most beds, built in cupboards, were small due to the cramped nature of the cottage and people generally slept in a seated position in the bed!
Cottage building began around the 1600’s when the obligation to attend church was introduced. Obviously there was no sewage system then, and even now the cottages have no running water or plumbing. Back in the day there were outhouses and now there are public bathrooms and shower houses.
An outhouse staple of the 1600’s until toilet paper was invented – the butt stick!
Let’s get that image out of our minds!
Ahhhh, Beer!