Crown princessly couple move into Haga Palace

Today Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel have moved into Haga Palace, the royal court has announced. The renovation of the palace was completed this summer, but the crown princessly couple’s cramped schedule has meant that it was only now that they had time to make the move. The royal court has promised that interior photos will be released later.
The small, neoclassical palace in the Haga Park in Solna, just outside Stockholm, was built in 1802-1805 by the architect Carl Christoffer Gjörwell. It is adjacent to the exquisite Gustaf III’s Pavilion and the so-called “ruins” of the huge palace which Gustaf III intended to build, but which was left unfinished when he was assassinated in 1792.
His son, Gustaf IV Adolf, found his father’s pavilion too small to house a family and had a new built to accomodate his children. It was thus first known as “the children’s mansion”, but acquired the name “the Queen’s Pavilion” during the reign of Carl XIII, when Queen Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta stayed there in the summers.
The future Oscar I also spent summers there with his family, but it was only his widowed daughter-in-law, Princess Teresia, the Dowager Duchess of Dalecarlia, who made it a permanent home. After her death in 1914 it was used by Prince Erik, the mentally challenged youngest son of Gustaf V. Following his death in 1918 it was opened up to children who had lost their homes as a result of World War I.
The most famous royal inhabitants were the parents of the current king, Prince Gustaf Adolf and Princess Sibylla, who moved into Haga Palace following their wedding in 1932. Their four daughters became colloquially known as “the Haga princesses” and the future Carl XVI Gustaf was born at Haga on 30 April 1946.
Nine months later Prince Gustaf Adolf was killed in an airplane accident and in 1950 the widowed Princess Sibylla moved to the Royal Palace when Haga was due to undergo repairs. However, she decided to remain at the Royal Palace and in 1966 King Gustaf VI Adolf renounced his royal right of disposal in favour of the government.
The government subsequently used the small palace as a conference centre and guest house. In April last year Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt announced that the government had decided to return the right of disposal to the royal family in order for it to serve as a home for Crown Princess Victoria and her family.

What to see: Prince Oscar Bernadotte’s Family Grave, Solna

Prince Oscar Bernadotte, the second son of King Oscar II and Queen Sophia, lost his status as a member of the Swedish-Norwegian Royal House when he married a commoner, Ebba Munck af Fulkila, in 1888. Therefore he was buried neither in the Bernadotte Mausoleum of the Riddarholmen Church nor at the Royal Burial Ground at Haga, but chose a plot on a hill at the Northern Cemetery in Solna, just outside Stockholm, as the last resting place of himself and his family.
The mausoleum was designed by Gunnar Asplund, one of Sweden’s most famous architects ever and best known for the Woodland Cemetery and the City Library in Stockholm. Above the crypt is a simple “temple” adorned with stone tablets with the names of those who are buried there. Prince Oscar was a month short of his 94th birthday when he died in October 1953, meaning that several other family members were buried there before him, among them his wife, Princess Ebba Bernadotte, who died in 1946.
All their five children are buried in the family grave. Their eldest son, Count Carl Bernadotte af Wisborg, died in 1977. His son Nils, who died at the age of two in 1920, is also buried there, while his first wife Marianne is buried elsewhere with her second husband Marcus Wallenberg. Carl Bernadotte’s second wife, Gerty, who died in 2004, was also interred elsewhere.
Prince Oscar’s youngest son, Count Folke Bernadotte af Wisborg, was assassinated by Israeli terrorists during a UN peace mission to Jerusalem in 1948. His wife Estelle is buried with him rather than with her second husband Carl-Eric Ekstrand, whose grave is also in the Northern Cemetery. Two of their sons are also in the family grave – Frederick, who died at the age of seven months in 1934, and Gustaf, who died at age six in 1936. Also there is their daughter-in-law Rosemarie, who was only 25 when she died a year after marrying their son Bertil.
The first of Prince Oscar and Princess Ebba Bernadotte’s children to die was Baroness Sofia Fleetwood in 1936, aged 44. Her widower Carl-Mårten Fleetwood later remarried and is not buried with her. Unlike Sofia, her sisters lived to a great age: Countess Maria Bernadotte af Wisborg died at 85 in 1974, while the humanitarian and politician Elsa Cedergren was three weeks short of her 103rd birthday when she died in 1996. She was laid to rest next to her husband Hugo Cedergren, who had died 25 years earlier at the age of 80.

What to see: The Royal Burial Ground, Haga

While all Swedish monarchs who died between 1632 and 1950, with one exception, rest in the Riddarholmen Church, most of the country’s 20th century royals are buried in the Royal Burial Ground in the Haga Park in Solna, just outside Stockholm.
The idea to create a royal cemetery came from Prince Carl around 1910. This coincided with new ideas about burials in general but also with the fact that there was little space left in the Bernadotte mausoleum in the Riddarholmen Church and the erection of another mausoleum to that historic church was not considered desirable.
Princess Ingeborg supported her husband’s wish to be buried outdoors and they were joined by Crown Princess Margareta, who, after witnessing Dowager Queen Sophia’s solemn funeral in January 1914, wrote that she did not want to be buried in the Riddarholmen Church, but “out in the nature at some place where also my family may get their last resting place”.
Prince Carl had suggested that an area of the Drottningholm Park might be set aside for a royal burial ground, but when there was procrastination, he threatened to acquire a burial spot for himself and his family at the public Northern Cemetery – like his brother, Prince Oscar Bernadotte, was to do.
In the end one settled for a small island in the Haga Park. Prince Carl took a lease on it in 1915 and had the buildings on it demolished. He also presented some drawings for a mausoleum which were probably made by the architect Ferdinand Boberg, a friend of the family. One did however settle for a more “natural” solutions, with crypts built into the landscape and covered with large stone slabs. Boberg did however design a granite cross which was erected at the highest point of the Royal Burial Ground and probably also the bridge and the gate seen in the first photo.
The Royal Burial Ground was ready in 1922 and the body of Crown Princess Margareta, who had died suddenly two years before, was brought there from its temporary resting place in the Cathedral of Stockholm. Her grave is seen in the second photo. She has later been joined by her husband, King Gustaf VI Adolf, who died in 1973, and his second wife, Queen Louise, who passed away in 1965 – probably the latter’s stillborn daughter is also buried there.
In front of the granite cross is the grave of the parents of the present King of Sweden – Prince Gustaf Adolf, who was killed in a plane accident in 1947, and Princess Sibylla, who died from cancer in 1972 (third photo).
Next to the grave of Gustaf VI Adolf and his wives is the tomb of his third son, the much-loved Prince Bertil, who died in 1997 (fourth picture). Thereafter comes the grave of Prince Carl (died 1951) and Princess Ingeborg (photo 5) – the latter’s date of death is, interestingly, given as 11 March 1958, although she was found dead in the morning of the 12th. Their son, Prince Carl Bernadotte, in 2003 became the so far last person to be laid to rest in the Royal Burial Ground.
Finally there is the grave of Gustaf VI Adolf’s second son, Sigvard, who died at 94 in 2002 (sixth picture). Several years passed before the tombstone was ready and I am told that this was because of the dispute over his title. Prince Sigvard had been stripped of his royal titles when he married a commoner in 1934 and was later accorded the title “Count Sigvard Bernadotte af Wisborg”. But in 1983 he assumed the title “Prince Sigvard Bernadotte”, which the King refused to acknowledge and at the time of Sigvard’s death, the issue had been sent to Strasbourg. In the end one settled for the text “Sigvard Bernadotte, born Prince of Sweden”, which everyone could agree was the case. The name and date of birth of his third wife, Marianne, has already been added to the gravestone with only the date of death left blank, which seems quite morbid to me as she is still alive and kicking.
The Royal Burial Ground is open to the public one day a week between May and August.

What to see: Ulriksdal Palace, Solna

Ulriksdal is one of the ten royal palaces in Sweden and can be found by Edsviken in the municipality of Solna just north of Stockholm. The first palace there was a Renaissance structure built in the 1640s, probably by the architect Hans Jacob Kristler, for Jakob De la Gardie and named Jakobsdal after him. In 1669 it was bought by Dowager Queen Hedvig Eleonora, who later presented it to her grandson Prince Ulrik at the time of his christening in 1684. It then received the new name Ulriksdal, but sadly the prince died at the age of one.
Hedvig Eleonora’s reconstruction of Ulriksdal, carried out by Nicodemus Tessin the Elder, was never completed and the current palace is mostly a result of a great rebuilding done by Carl Hårleman on behalf of her granddaughter, Queen Ulrika Eleonora, in the years 1727-1729. That was when two projecting wings were added on the side which faces towards the park and the roof was supplied with a lantern. It later became one of the favourite residences of King Adolf Fredrik and Queen Lovisa Ulrika and the Dowager Queen Sophia Magdalena lived there from 1808 until her death in 1813.
King Carl XIV Johan, who had been a Marshal of the French Empire, in 1822 created a home for invalid veterans of the 1808-1809 war with Russia at Ulriksdal, inspired by the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris. For the happy reason that Sweden has not been at war since 1814, the number of veterans soon dwindled and in 1849 the remaining few were moved to Danviken Hospital.
In 1856 Ulriksdal again became a royal residence when the future King Carl XV and his wife Lovisa moved in. Today Ulriksdal is first and foremost Carl XV’s palace. King Carl dreamed of the days when Sweden had been a great power and collected furniture and other items from that period. His collection was installed at Ulriksdal, which means that most of the interiors are still in a Renaissance/ mock 16th century style. The joint Swedish-Norwegian arms can still be found above the main entrance, as the fourth photo shows.
His sister-in-law, Queen Sophia, received Ulriksdal as a dower house on the death of Oscar II in 1907, but did not leave many marks on the palace, where she lived in the south wing. Three years after her death, in 1916, her grandson, the future Gustaf VI Adolf, and his wife Margareta, were given the right of disposition and began a reconstruction which was interrupted when the Crown Princess suddenly died in 1920. In 1923 Gustaf Adolf remarried and the architect Sigge Cronstedt created a home for him and Crown Princess Louise at Ulriksdal.
Their footprints are most visible in what had been Carl XV’s “Hall of Knights” – there the dark interior was torn out and the room was transformed to a modern living room. The interior, designed by Carl Malmsten, was a wedding present from the people of Stockholm to the newlyweds and was the first room in a Swedish royal palace to be called a living room rather than a drawing room.
Malmsten considered it the ideal living room and obviously the royal couple agreed. Gustaf VI Adolf stayed at Ulriksdal regularly until 1972, the year before his death, and changed next to nothing in the living room in those nearly fifty years. After his death, time has stood still there – the newspapers from 1972 are still on the table and his and Louise’s monogram as crown prince and crown princess can still be found on the cast-iron gate (photo 5).
In the summer of 1940, Crown Princess Märtha of Norway and her three children in great secrecy stayed at Ulriksdal for several weeks after escaping the Nazi occupation of their country and before going on to the USA. Since 1986 Ulriksdal is open to the public and is occasionally used by the royal family for various events, such as Princess Madeleine’s 25th birthday party in 2007. WWF, which is close to the King of Sweden’s heart, is housed in the south wing of the palace.
There are several other buildings of interest in the park. The orangery (sixth picture) was built in 1693-1705 by the architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger (best known for the Royal Palace in Stockholm) and is the oldest orangery in Sweden. In this reign it has been transformed into a museum for Swedish sculpture. The theatre Confidencen was founded by Queen Lovisa Ulrika in 1753 and is as such the oldest operating theatre in the country. Villa Beylon, which can be glimpsed in the seventh photo, was built in 1802-1804 and was until recently the home of Princess Christina, who now lives in Stockholm. Certain parts of the media were convinced that Villa Beylon would be become the married home of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling, but they settled for Haga Palace.
The Palace Chapel, seen in the last picture, was built by Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander in 1864-1865 and consecrated on the name day of Queen Lovisa on 25 August 1865 – it therefore used to be known as Queen Lovisa’s Chapel. Carl XV himself took an active part in creating the chapel, which is built in what the architect called “Dutch Renaissance”, inspired by the fact that Queen Lovisa was Dutch by birth. Their daughter Lovisa, later Queen of Denmark, was confirmed there in 1868.
When Carl XV fell seriously ill, he felt that he had not achieved much in his short reign and was not worthy of being buried with his predecessors in the Riddarholm Church. He therefore asked to be buried in the Palace Chapel at Ulriksdal. However, his brother and successor, Oscar II, duly had him buried in the Riddarholm Church with the other kings and queens of Sweden.