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National Geographic : 1973 Aug
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Gotland STATUTEMILES DRAWNBY LEOB. ZEBARTH COMPILEDBY GUNARSJ. RUTINS Lummelun Brissund. FARON, ' RESTRICTED -- MILITARYAREA VISB' To Gnisvar ierrvik -jugarn lRonehamn WI Lighthous Way-stop for traders, Gotland prospered as a crossroads of commerce as early as the Bronze Age, archeologists believe. Today, forgotten by merchant shipmasters, the island in the nearly tideless Baltic lives by farming, small-scale industry, and tourists lured by its numerous sunny summer days. Treasure from a Viking ship attests the far-flung wanderings of the Norsemen, who knocked at the gates of Asia. Arab coins and coils of silver, along with smaller German coins, date from about A.D. 1000. Unearthed by a gardener in 1943, the cache now glitters in a Visby museum. NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHER GORDONW.GAHAN 'Botvaldvik National Geographic,August 1973 Kovil Klinteham Lilla Karlso 0 Stora* Karlso Danes," Kurt Werner observed. "Well, I am a Dane, and I have been coming to this very same lane for 23 years. Why? Because the Gotlanders are the friendliest people in Scan dinavia. This island is like a family. If you come here once, you are a member." In the month my wife, Hannah, and I lived on Gotland, we too were adopted into the family. At the very start there appeared our most unwicked landlord, Alvar Hallgren, and his wife and two beautiful daughters, taffy blond Asa, 20, and golden-blond Eva, 19. While tidying up the already spotless four room apartment, the girls decided what we should see and do on Gotland. They prom ised, especially, to take us to a place that had the "old" dances-meaning the fox-trot and waltz. They abhorred the rock-and-roll that Visby's cellar discotheques dispense to Stock holm longhairs (page 288). "And we really like to be with the old peo ple," Asa confided. (How could we ancients take offense? For later she and her fiance, Kenneth Jacobsson, did indeed dance us around to the rhythms of our youth.) Privileged Place "Within the Wall" Mr. Hallgren hoped we were not too dis appointed with the apartment. We could not have been happier. From our top-floor bal cony we looked down on Visby's harbor, where car ferries from Sweden and passenger ships from Finland backed and filled to enter the narrow port. From our windows we could scan the antique city full circle. In the east, Visby's Wall, with its 37 towers, some 70 feet high, marched to the Baltic in a two-mile arc (pages 276-7). We lived "within the wall," as only 2,700 of modern Visby's 20,000 residents do, and marveled that in medieval times possibly 10,000 people crowded in there. Closer to our view, the tall gray skeletons of ruined churches yearned heavenward. At Visby's medieval apogee, 17 churches-some nearly cathedral-size-shouldered each other on the quarter square mile within the wall, for every foreign trading group in old Visby wanted its own place of worship. When Ger mans from Liibeck, early commercial rival of Visby, sacked the city in 1525, they burned a number of churches, but left St. Mary's, the church of German merchants, still in use. On Visby's three terraces, medieval sky scraper warehouses up to seven stories high dazzled our eyes. Visitors arriving by ship 600 years ago gasped at the skyline, as tourists do 270
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