Cities of the world: St Petersburg in 20 pictures

The Winter Palace

The Church on Spilt Blood, built on the spot where Aleksandr II was assassinated

A sphinx, aged 3,300

Soviet architecture

Where there is a Winter Palace, there is also a Summer Palace

The Smolny Cathedral, Rastrelli’s baroque masterpiece

Perfect proportions – Architect Rossi Street

The river Neva

Art nouveau at the Vitebsky Station

Decembrist Square seen from St Isaac’s Cathedral

By the river Fontanka

The golden spire of Saints Pyotr and Pavel’s Cathedral

Mikhailovsky Palace (Russian Museum)

The Kazan Cathedral

The Singer building on Nevsky Prospekt

Yelagin Palace

The former Stock Exchange and the Rostral Columns at the Spit of Vasilievsky Island

Tauride Palace, presented by Ekaterina II to Potyomkin

St Isaac’s Cathedral

The Palace Square with the Alexander Column and the General Staff Building

Book news: “Harry & Charles”

At the end of December NRK broadcast the drama series “Harry & Charles”, which dealt with Prince Carl and Princess Maud of Denmark and the events of 1905 which brought them to the throne of Norway as King Haakon VII and Queen Maud.
The series was approximately 10 % facts and 90 % fiction and has been the subject of some debate, with some people thinking it went too far in setting actual persons into an almost entirely fictious intrigue. Particularly the portrayal of the relationship between Prince Carl and his wife’s lady-in-waiting Astrid Carstensen has come under attack.
Next week the book version of the series will be published by Piratforlaget. Harry & Charles - En kjærlighetshistorie by Jonas Cornell is clearly marked “roman” (“novel”) on its cover.

New books: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

One may wonder what might be the purpose of yet another book on Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Britain. One reason for writing one might be that one had found new material; another that one believed oneself capable of telling the story from a new angle and thereby reaching a new understanding. The latter seems to be the American author Gillian Gill’s incentive for writing We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals, published by Ballantine Books of New York last spring and soon out in paperback.
Gill’s main focus is the relations between human beings. Queen Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s marriage was not the romanticised thing often portrayed, but “an extraordinary feat achieved against the odds”, Gill writes. She argues that “their marriage was always a work in progress, not a fait accompli, a drama not a pageant. Theirs was a business partnership as well as a marriage, and they engaged in an impassioned, weirdly public contest over who was the senior partner”.
This is an interesting approach, yet Gills somehow downplays how stormy the marriage in fact was and how Queen Victoria, particularly in later years, often tormented her husband. A closer look at this might have added to our understanding of the Queen’s excessive grief and her idolisation of her husband after his death – a grief to which it seems a certain amount of regret and perhaps sense of guilt was added.
The book is very well written, it is clear that the author is very familiar with her theme and the way she describes the interaction between the Queen and the Prince Consort is interesting. Yet it is a paradox that the best part of the book is the first, titled “The Years Alone”, where she explores the respective backgrounds and upbringings of Victoria and Albert.
Gill seems particularly taken with the tale of the young Victoria and how she, after an unhappy and constrained childhood, at the time of her accession at the age of 18 emerged as a monarch who “understood the business of monarchy better than any of her male ancestors”. In contrast, she argues, Prince Albert was “just an overprotected youth fatally confident of his abilities to rule a kingdom”. To me this seems a bit over the top. As Gill also acknowledges, Queen Victoria was during the first years of her reign closely aligned with one political party and at odds with the other and she put her feet wrong on a number of occasions. It cannot be denied that Prince Albert’s understanding of constitutional monarchy was superior to hers and that his influence on her in that respect was very significant.
The book’s focus on the personal relations means that Victoria’s and Albert’s, and particularly the Prince Consort’s, achievements on the public stage get somewhat lost. It is also obvious that Gillian Gill is more at home when it comes to personal relationships than less domestic historical and political events. This shows both through a number of gross factual mistakes, such as when she ascribes the Brumaire coup to Napoléon III, and through her according individuals too much influence on history.
A notable example of the latter is when she writes that if Prince Albert had lived a year longer he might have persuaded Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia not to talk his father out of abdicating. If so, Friedrich’s wife, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, would have become Queen of Prussia in 1862 and Gill tells us: “It is not absurd to argue that, had the prince consort lived even one more year, had his daughter Vicky had a chance to dictate Crown policy and shape society in Prussia, there might not have been a First World War”. This is not only absurd but utter nonsense. Firstly, history shows that Prussian queens consort had very little chance to influence society or dictate policy. Secondly, the reasons for World War I were so complex that no single person would have been able to prevent it no matter the strength of her character.
The author has a slight bias towards Queen Victoria at the expense of Prince Albert and occasionally seems to be a little chauvinistic on behalf of her own sex towards men in general. Nevertheless she is mostly, although not always, quite fair towards both her two subjects. One notable exception is when she persists in arguing that Queen Victoria following her husband’s death rather enjoyed playing what she calls “the tragedy queen”. One might agree with Gill that the way Queen Victoria expressed her grief through four decades might have been a little over the top, yet it seems obvious that her grief was genuine and that she did not view Prince Albert’s death as her own victory in their struggle for power.
It should be added that the book’s design (by Barbara Bachman) is very good.

When it comes to the literature about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert it may be added as a postscript that the upcoming exhibition “Victoria & Albert: Art & Love” at the Queen’s Gallery in London will be accompanied by a catalogue running to 430 pages, edited by Jonathan Marsden.

New books: Nazi Germany’s allies and the question of guilt

In 2006 the Swedish journalist Henrik Arnstad published his biography of Christian Günther, the country’s wartime foreign minister who bears much of the responsibility for the country’s somewhat too friendly attitude towards Nazi Germany during the first years of World War II. This policy has come under debate in Sweden in recent decades, and in his new book, Skyldig till skuld – En europeisk resa i Nazitysklands skugga, Arnstad looks at how the countries which were Nazi Germany’s actual allies have dealt with the question of their own share in the guilt.
He argues that the Axis countries’ collective memories are often very selective and that some of them have chosen to cast themselves in the role as victims rather than facing their own crimes. The fact that Germany has taken on the guilt issue so openly that the collective sense of responsibility is ever present in that country has in Arnstad’s view contributed to making it more difficult for other countries to do so – or easier to avoid doing so.
Finland is the prime example, according to Arnstad. The national hero Marshal Mannerheim was a “war criminal – responsible for concentration camps, ethnic cleansing and mass murder”. The book offers a detailed background for these charges, and Arnstad points out that Finland in cooperation with Germany planned and carried out the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.
Following the war Finland’s view of its own wartime history has been characterised by concerns for the nation’s honour being put above truth. Rather than taking to task their country’s crimes, the Finns prefer to remember the more glorious Winter War of 1939-1940 and have indulged in debates such as if Finland and Germany were not really allied but just happened to fight a common enemy. Arnstad dismisses such notions and concludes that Finland in reality was Germany’s most important ally.
In Rome Henrik Arnstad found the “Liberation Museum” (Museo Storico della Liberazione) symptomatic of how Italy sees its role in the war. The museum is concerned solely with the allied “liberation” of Italy in 1943 and the German atrocities committed on Italian soil during the next two years. Italy’s own alliance with Nazi Germany before that is simply ignored.
To select only one part of one’s story and thereby being able to cast oneself in the role of victim is something which has also been done in Austria, a country where the denials had to be faced when the old Nazi Kurt Waldheim was elected President in 1986. But the idea that Austria was “Hitler’s first victim” still prevails and as recently as 2008 Otto von Habsburg said that “no country in Europe has a greater right than Austria to call itself a victim”. Arnstad sees these ideas in relation with the growing right-wing extremism in both Italy and Austria.
Henrik Arnstad’s book is thought-provoking and an important contribution to the fight against historical forgetfulness. It might however have been interesting if he had also included Spain and how that country is currently trying to come to terms with its Fascist past.

Exhibition on the Royal Palace and Linstow

The National Museum’s department of architecture will later this year arrange the exhibition “Slottet og Linstow – Den nye hovedstadens grunnstein” (“The Royal Palace and Linstow – The Foundation Stone of the New Capital”). When Norway became independent in 1814 Christiania (now Oslo) became its capital once again and in the following decades underwent a rapid transformation which included the erection of numerous monumental buildings worthy of a royal capital.
The most prestigious of these was the Royal Palace, which, through its location to the west of the then city centre, also came to point out the direction in which the capital developed. The young and comparatively inexperienced Hans D. F. Linstow was chosen by King Carl XIV Johan to be the architect for the Palace and it was also Linstow who drew up the new city plan and sketched out the capital’s main street, which is naturally called Karl Johans gate.
The work on the Royal Palace met with so many difficulties and took a quarter of a century. Work started in 1822, the foundation stone was laid in 1825 and the Palace was completed in 1849. By then Carl XIV Johan had been dead for five years and Linstow himself had only two years left to live. Thus he never had time to build much else, but one of Europe’s most beautiful royal palaces and most stately streets are his lasting legacy.
The exhibition, which will run from 7 May to 10 October, will deal with the history and the interiors of the Palace. Among its highlights will be “the Grand Composition”, i.e. Linstow’s most important drawings for the interiors, executed in connection with his study tour to Denmark and Germany.
The National Museum’s department for decorative arts will by the way host the exhibition “Sakrale skatter fra Kreml” (“Ecclesiastical Treasures from the Kremlin”) from 23 September 2010 to 25 January 2011.

Book news: Some expected books in 2010

A new year has dawned and that offers a good opportunity to take a look at some of the books which can be expected in 2010.
Among them are several which have been postponed from last year, such as Carl-Erik Grimstad’s Dronning Mauds arv (“Queen Maud’s Inheritance”), which is due in March; Jennifer Scott’s The Royal Portrait: Image and Impact (expected in April); Anne Somerset’s Queen Anne: A Biography (also April); and Jane Ridley’s Bertie: A Biography of Edward VII. Rene Brus’s book Crown Jewellery and Regalia of the World, which has already been postponed several times since 2008, was recently postponed yet again and is now expected in October 2010.
For the Swedish royals it will be a momentous year with the bicentenary of the Bernadottes’ arrival and two weddings to be celebrated. As earlier mentioned tabloid journalist Johan T. Lindwall is writing (although he denies it) Victoria – Prinsessan privat (“Victoria: The Princess in Private”) about the Crown Princess (expected in March) and the historian Stig Hadenius will release Drottning Victoria av Sverige – Om kärlek, plikt och politik (“Queen Victoria of Sweden: On Love, Duty and Politics”) about the consort of Gustaf V in April. The weddings will as previously reported also be the occasion for a book on royal weddings, En brud för kung och fosterland – Kungliga svenska bröllop från Gustav Vasa till Carl XVI Gustaf (“A Bride for King and Country: Swedish Royal Weddings from Gustav Vasa to Carl XVI Gustaf”), by Lena Rangström (expected in early March), and an official wedding book by Susanna Popova, due out a month after the Crown Princess’s June wedding.
The Bernadottes came to Sweden after the sudden death of Crown Prince Carl August, the former Prince Christian August of Augustenburg, in 1810. The 200th anniversary of his death will be the occasion for a biography by American historian Lee Sather. The Napoleonic Wars in the Nordic countries will also be covered in the Russian historian Vadim V. Roginskij’s Kampen om Norden – Internationella relationer i Norden 1805-1815 (“The Struggle for Scandinavia: International Relations in the Nordic Region 1805-1815”).
In Sweden we will also see the publication of the second volume on Drottningholm in the series on the Swedish royal palaces; Moa Matthis’s biography of the wife of Gustaf II Adolf and mother of Queen Christina, Maria Eleonora – Drottningen som sa nej (“Maria Eleonora: The Queen Who Said No”); and the book Monarki vs. republik, where Per Svensson argues the case for a republic and P. J. Anders Linder defends the monarchy.
The Danish royal family will also have its share of celebrations in 2010. 28 March is the centenary of the birth of Queen Ingrid, which will be marked by a book by Roger Lundgren which will be published in both Denmark (People’s Press) and Sweden (Fischer) in March. In the same month Rosvall Royal Books will publish Ingrid, 1910-2000 by Randi Buchwaldt and Ted Rosvall (in Danish and English). Queen Ingrid’s gardens will be the subject of Blomsterdronningen - Dronning Ingrids slotshaver by John Henriksen.
Queen Margrethe’s 70th birthday in April will be the occasion for Jesper Laursen’s Dronning Margrethe og arkæologien (“Queen Margrethe and Archaeology”) and Helle Bygum’s Et fantastisk liv – Dronning Margrethe 70 år (“A Wonderful Life: Queen Margrethe at 70”). Her husband, the Prince Consort, will be the subject of the journalist Stéphanie Surrugue’s Prins – Historien om Henrik (“Prince: The Story of Henrik”), to be published by Politikens Bogforlag in April. As Surrugue has been invited to several royal events recently, including Prince Joachim’s wedding, I guess this is a more or less authorised book.
In Norway the fifth volume of Tor Bomann-Larsen’s biography of King Haakon VII and Queen Maud will be published in the autumn, taking the story up to 7 June 1940, the day King Haakon had to leave Norway at the end of the campaign which followed the German invasion.

My latest article: Oscarshall Palace as royal residence

Today I have an article in Aften (the evening issue of Aftenposten) in which I reveal that, contrary to what has generally been thought, Oscarshall Palace has in fact been a royal residence.
When I worked as a guide at Oscarshall Palace we were told that legend says that Oscar I spent only one night at the Palace he and his wife Queen Josephina had built between 1847 and 1852. The same legend is referred to in Gunnar Hjelde’s book Oscarshall – Lystslottet på Bygdøy (1978), while Nina Høye, an art historian employed by the Royal Court, dismissed it as “most likely not correct” in her recent book Oscarshall (2009). It is not clear what Høye based her dismissal on.
As Oscar I came to Norway only twice after Oscarshall was completed – in 1852 and 1855 – these were the only chances he had to use his new palace. My friend Monica Mørch, who is in charge of the Norwegian Folk Museum’s project about the history of Bygdøy Royal Manor, has found a document which shows that the King intended to stay at Oscarshall in 1852. That year the royal visit was however cut short by the death of the King’s son, Prince Gustaf, upon their arrival in Christiania (now Oslo).
But in the summer of 1855 the King returned to Christiania with two of his surviving sons, Crown Prince Carl and Prince Oscar, and his daughter-in-law Crown Princess Lovisa. On 14 August 1855 the newspaper Morgenbladet informs us: “The King resides at Oscarshall”.
Later the royals went to Horten, and when they returned the same newspaper says that the Crown Prince and Crown Princess moved into the Royal Palace. Some days later the students, carrying torches, paraded past Oscarshall in boats in honour of the King, who was obviously again in residence there.
The King also received important visitors at Oscarshall, among them the French minister to Norway and Sweden. During the ongoing Crimean War King Oscar I was busy distancing himself from his father’s pro-Russian politics and wished for a rapprochement with France and Britain, something which resulted in the so-called “November Treaty” later that year.
Another visitor to the King at Oscarshall was the Governor General, Severin Løvenskiold. Supposedly the King and the Governor General discussed Løvenskiold’s retirement, a wish the King granted when he appointed Crown Prince Carl Viceroy of Norway the next year.
Løvenskiold himself wrote in his autobiographical notes that the King stayed at Oscarshall from 29 July to 1 September 1855. This is however not correct and those dates were the dates for the King’s entire stay in Norway that year. He left on 1 September 1855, never to return to Norway before succumbing to a brain tumour in July 1859.
After the article was completed I have found some further information and is thus able to add that King Oscar I and Prince Oscar moved into Oscarshall Palace on 31 July 1855.

The article may be read here:
http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/debatt/article3442408.ece

Greek royal engagement

Ex-King Konstantinos and ex-Queen Anne-Marie of the Hellenes yesterday announced the engagement of their second son, Prince Nikolaós, and Tatiana Blatnik. Little is known about the future Princess of Greece, except that she works for Diane von Fürstenberg. She is probably in her early thirties; her father was supposedly Slovenian while her mother is apparently German. The Prince, her boyfriend of six years, works for his father.
The engagement was announced from Greece, where the ex-royal family is holidaying. During the years they were banned from entering Greece the ex-King and ex-Queen constantly made grand statements such as “Greece is my home” and “I want to die in Greece”, but after it become possible for them to settle there, they have been in no haste to do so and seem content to go there for shorter stays.
No date has been announced for the wedding. Prince Nikolaós’s elder siblings both married in London, but it is now possible that his wedding may be held in Greece.

New books: The Swedish Crown Regalia

The Swedish Royal Collection has recently published a new book on the Crown Regalia, titled Skattkammaren – Kungliga slottet with text in Swedish, English, French, German and Russian.
The author, Ann-Christine Jernberg, works in the Royal Court’s information department and, as the five languages indicate, this book is mostly directed at tourists. The twelve crowns and the other items kept in the Treasury are briefly described, but the text offers no deeper perspectives and there are some very unnecessary mistakes.
This book’s greatest value lies in the large, clear photos of the items, most of them by the Royal Collection’s photographer Alexis Daflos. Some of them are however cropped in a rather unfortunate way. Among the illustrations are also some historical photos and reproductions of paintings.

Happy Christmas!

What to see: Paris at Christmas time

New books: The landowners

Jorden de ärvde (“The Land They Inherited”) has been one of the most talked-about non-fiction books in Sweden this autumn. In it, the journalist Björn af Kleen looks at the large estates still in the possession of the nobility and tries to explain how they have managed to hang on to them.
At the centre is the entail system, known as “fideikommiss” in Swedish, whereby the estate with all its land, buildings and collections is inherited undivided by the eldest son of each generation. Most countries abolished this system a rather long time ago, while Sweden only took steps to do so in the second half of the 20th century. Fifty years ago there were 111 entailed estates in Sweden and in 1964 it was decided by law that they would be dissolved upon the death of the incumbent.
There was, however, an article saying that an entail might be prolonged if the estate was of significant cultural value. This article was meant specifically for Skokloster Castle, but the author explores how several other landowners have won government approval for the prolongation of the entail connected to their estates.
This is not unproblematic, as it has deprived younger siblings, daughters in particular, of their inheritance. Occasionally entails have been prolonged in direct contravention of a late landowner’s will, thereby creating some rather bitter family feuds. The author provides several examples of this, such as Johan af Petersens’s falling out with his siblings and demanding the eviction of his 90-year-old mother from the manor, describing “Mummy’s occupation of the Big House at Erstavik” as “a criminal act”.
There are several quite detailed descriptions of such family feuds, and as a reader one may sometimes feel that the author goes a bit too far in washing other people’s dirty linen in public. One of the landowners portrayed in the book, Baron Carl Gripenstedt, has already taken legal action, but later withdrew the case.
In the second part of the book, Björn af Kleen investigates in what other ways the nobility and the landowners (not all of whom are noble) have tried to maintain their privileges and way of life. Several landowners are interviewed in the book and they implicitly provide a quite fascinating insight into their mentality and how they see the world.

New books: Carl XIV Johan’s favourite architect

Fredrik Blom (1781-1853) was an officer-turned-architect who became a leading protagonist of Swedish neoclassicism and the favourite architect of King Carl XIV Johan. Among his best-known works are Rosendal Palace, the former Carl Johan’s Church (popularly known as Skeppsholmskyrkan) and his transportable houses, but he also put his mark on Stockholm through several other monumental buildings. Blom valued functionality and his works are mostly quite simplistic – in my view sometimes too simple to be called elegant.
The art historian Carine Lundberg never finished her planned book on Fredrik Blom, meaning that until now no major study of him has been available. The military historian Thomas Roth tries to rectify this with his new book Fredrik Blom – Karl Johans arkitekt, published by Bokförlaget Signum in October, but does not quite succeed.
The author takes a mostly chronological approach to the life and work of Fredrik Blom, interspersed with some more thematic chapters. He identifies Blom’s buildings and gives quite detailed descriptions of what they look like. Roth is mostly concerned with the exteriors, and we learn little about Blom’s interiors. Rosendal Palace, arguably Blom’s most important work, is not dealt with as thoroughly as would seem natural – the author is content to note that the small palace has been the subject of another book some years ago.
The greatest problems about this book are that it seems the author does not really understand architecture and that he sees Blom in a much too isolated way. His buildings are seen in relation neither to each other nor to the works of other architects of the time. The author’s knowledge of architecture seems to stop at headings such as “neoclassicism”, “empire style” and “neo-Gothic”, but of course these styles are diverse and complex. Roth several times refers to “Blom’s style”, but does not say much about what was characteristic of his style and what set him apart from other architects’ works.
Without further ado, Roth includes Krontorp Manor among Fredrik Blom’s works, proclaiming that he is convinced by the art historian Hans-Olof Boström’s theory that Blom is a more likely architect than Hans D. F. Linstow, to whom Krontorp has traditionally been ascribed. He does not enter into Boström’s arguments (which are debatable), but only says that “the style and the similarities with Elghammar” indicates that Blom was the architect. There are other possible explanations for the similarities between Krontorp and Elghammar, and in fact Krontorp is very untypical of Blom’s style, in fact of Swedish neoclassicism in general. It is also difficult to understand how Roth is thinking when he writes that Norrnäs Manor is reminiscent of Rosendal Palace.
Only in the penultimate paragraph of this book does the author try to put Blom into context. Then he says that Blom’s style was most strongly inspired by Desprez, Quarenghi and Palladio, but that the architect most closely related to Blom’s style was Carl Ludvig Engel. It is beyond me how Thomas Roth has reached such a conclusion – in fact Engel’s elegant, richly ornamented buildings must be considered almost the opposite of the simplicity characteristic of Fredrik Blom’s works.
The author is obviously very knowledgeable about Fredrik Blom and has apparently put much work into this book. But this isolated knowledge is not enough and the absence of a context coupled with Roth’s limited understanding of architecture in general makes it a less valuable book that in might otherwise have been. As it is, it demonstrates that knowledge and understanding may in fact not be as closely related as is generally assumed.

New books: Royal Haga

Many were disappointed when the great book series on the Swedish royal palaces, after three years and five volumes, was cancelled in 2005 because the publisher Byggförlaget closed down its business. As earlier mentioned the Royal Court and the Swedish Property Board this year reached an agreement with Gullers Förlag to resume the series, but after another change of publisher the series ended up with Votum Förlag in Karlstad. In November Votum published the first volume of the resurrected series: Haga – Ett kungligt kulturarv, edited by Ingrid Sjöström.
In contrast to the other royal palaces, Haga is actually more of a domain than a palace, as the huge Haga Palace was never completed. The small Haga Palace, the future home of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling, and Gustaf III’s Pavilion may however be found on the estate in addition to numerous other buildings.
This English landscape park sits by Brunnsviken in Solna, just outside the border to the city of Stockholm. It may be reached on foot from the capital and is a green lung much loved by the inhabitants of Stockholm. With Ulriksdal and Djurgården, Haga since 1994 makes up the National City Park, the only of its kind in the world.
Two volumes on Haga in this series had originally been planned, but with the changed circumstances it has all been comprised into one. Probably as a consequence of this, the type is somewhat smaller than in the previous books, but otherwise the design and layout is the same as in the volumes on the palaces Rosendal, Rosersberg, Drottningholm, China and Strömsholm. It is profusely and beautifully illustrated with maps, paintings, architectural drawings, sketches and photos. The prominent Danish architectural photographer Jens Lindhe has taken the new photos for this book, and among the authors are Sweden’s leading experts on the relevant topics.
The historian Jonas Nordin opens the book with a chapter on Gustaf III’s Haga. It was Gustaf III who “discovered” Haga, acquired it as his private property and developed it. The King enjoyed withdrawing to the peace and simplicity of Haga, which also played a significant part in the staging of his public persona.
Gustaf III had great plans for Haga and the art historian Magnus Olausson devotes an extensive chapter to the pleasure park and some of its follies and other buildings. The greatest plan of all was for the erection of a huge palace on a hill in the Haga Park. Only the foundation walls of this grandiose project had been built by the time the King was assassinated and it was left unfinished. If the unfinished palace was meant to be the Swedish Versailles, the smaller Gustaf III’s Pavilion, which was completed about the time of the King’s death, is the northern Petit Trianon. Both the large palace and the smaller pavilion are dealt with in an interesting chapter by Göran Alm, head of the Bernadotte Library.
Stina Olinder Haubo looks at the interiors of Gustaf III’s Pavilion and Thérèse von Lampe interprets its allegorical decorations. Tomas Lidman, Sweden’s national archivist, writes about the pavilion’s library, how it left Sweden with Gustaf IV Adolf and was repatriated much later.
Anita Ankarcrona takes a look at the poet Carl Michael Bellman’s relation to Haga. It is a rather short chapter and Haga in poetry and literature is a topic which I think could have been dealt with more extensively in this book.
The historian Mikael Alm writes about Gustaf IV Adolf and Haga, while the art historian Ursula Sjöberg devotes a chapter to the small Haga Palace, which was built during his reign to house the royal children. Ingrid Sjöström takes a look at Haga during the 19th century before Ursula Sjöberg returns to give us the story of Haga Palace as the home of Prince August and his widow Princess Teresia, who lived there until her death in 1914.
A small weakness of this kind of book is that the thematic approach means that some minor issues fall between chairs and therefore go unmentioned. We read that Haga Palace was a royal residence until 1918, but not a word is said about who stayed there after Princess Teresia’s death (the answer is Prince Erik).
Catharina Nolin deals with the Haga Park in the 19th and early 20th century and Paul Wilund writes about the restoration work at Haga during the 20th century. Gustaf III’s Pavilion is today often considered the very essence of Swedish 18th century still, but Wilund points out that the restorations are not wholly truthful.
The so far last royal residents at Haga were Prince Gustaf Adolf and Princess Sibylla, who came to live there after their wedding in 1932. The Princess remained there for three years after her husband was killed in 1947. Göran Alm writes about the interiors of Haga Palace in their days, while Ingrid Sjöström tells the story of their five children – the present King and his four sisters, who were collectively known as “the Haga Princesses” in what amounted to a cult in the 1940s.
Sjöström also writes about the other buildings in the park in the 20th century and about the use of Haga Palace as a government guest house from the 1960s until this year, when the right of disposal was returned to the King in order to make Haga the Crown Princess couple’s home. Christian Laine finishes the book with short chapters on the Royal National City Park and the pleasure parks around Brunnsviken – and the challenges they are faced by.
This book is not entirely flawless, but all in all it is a great book and a treasure throve of information about this royal estate held in great affection by the people of Stockholm. Its high standard in all respects promises well for the continuation of the book series. The second volume on Drottningholm is expected in the spring, to be followed by books on Tullgarn, Ulriksdal, Gripsholm and three volumes on the Royal Palace itself.

On this date: A president resigns – and dies

Many presidential resignations have come as a result of great personal or political drama, but few have ended in such drama as Kyösti Kallio’s. Kallio had become President of Finland in 1937 and was still in office when the Soviet Union attacked Finland in 1939. As the leader of a small country which had been attacked by a great power, Kallio received much sympathy when he travelled abroad to plead his country’s case and when he, in a radio speech, appealed to the world to support Finland.
By then the President’s health was causing grave concerns. Kallio had suffered a major heart attack in 1939, and in November 1940 he announced that he would be resigning out of health reasons. Because of the turbulent world situation a regular presidential election was not held, but the electoral college of the previous presidential election (1937) was reassembled. On 19 December 1940 it elected Prime Minister Risto Ryti President.
Shortly thereafter, Kallio, no longer President of Finland, left the Presidential Palace and drove to Helsinki’s railway station, where a train was waiting to take him back home to Nivala. And there, on the platform, right in front of the guard of honour, the band playing a march, Kyösti Kallio collapsed and died. The photo (now in the public domain) was taken by Hugo Sundström just seconds before.

What to see: Stockholm at Christmas time

While Oslo puts up the same hideous decorations from the 1980s every year, Stockholm, like Paris, is one of those cities which really puts an effort into its Christmas decorations. These photos are from 2008 and 2009.

Royal jewels: The Norwegian emerald parure

The emerald parure is the grandest set of jewellery in the hands of the Norwegian royal family and is as such always worn by the Queen for the most important state occasions – the wedding of the Crown Prince and the Emperor of Japan’s state visit being two examples. It has also been worn for three British coronations.
An oft-repeated legend says that the jewels originally belonged to Empress Joséphine of the French – some even maintain that the tiara was worn by her to her and Napoléon’s coronation in Notre-Dame in December 1804. However, this seems likely to be a legend invented by the Swedish writer Sigyn Reimers in the 1950s.
In fact there is no parure in any of the relevant inventories of the Empress’s jewels whose description matches the Norwegian parure. According to an oral tradition in the royal family the emeralds themselves are from a Russian mine which is now extinct. As far as I know, emeralds were not found in Russia until the 1830s, while the Empress died in 1814.
But the emerald parure did certainly belong to Joséphine’s daughter-in-law, Duchess Auguste Amalie of Leuchtenberg. In her will she left it to her daughter, ex-Empress Amélie of Brazil, while her eldest daughter, Queen Josephina of Norway and Sweden, inherited a sapphire parure which to this day is frequently worn by Queen Silvia.
As the Brazilian Empress’s only child predeceased her, she left her jewels to her sister Josephina upon her death in 1873. The Swedish courtier Countess Mina Bonde apparently owned a portrait of Queen Josephina in old age wearing the emerald parure, but the current whereabouts of this painting are unknown.
After Josephina’s death in 1873, the emeralds passed to her daughter-in-law Queen Sophia. Upon her death in 1913, Sophia left them in her will to her youngest daughter-in-law, Princess Ingeborg. Ingeborg frequently wore the parure, but also made some rather unfortunate changes to it. She removed the drop-shaped emeralds on either side of the centre stone of the tiara and made earrings out of them and she also removed most of the seven pendants from the necklace and distributed them between her children.
It has often been said that Princess Ingeborg gave the emerald parure to her middle daughter, Crown Princess Märtha of Norway, when she gave birth to a son, the present King of Norway, in 1937. This is however incorrect. Princess Ingeborg gave the parure to her daughter, wrapped in a scarf, at the Central Station in Stockholm in August 1940 when the Crown Princess embarked for the USA. With Norway occupied by Nazi Germany, Ingeborg was not sure if she would ever see her daughter again or if Märtha would ever be able to return to Norway. The emeralds were supposed to be her “life insurance” – the intention was to sell the emeralds one by one if they got in a desperate financial situation.
Luckily this was never necessary and Crown Princess Märtha was able to return to Norway in 1945. She died already in 1954 and her mother, who outlived her by four years, expressed the wish that the emeralds should be inherited by Märtha’s son and be part of the Norwegian “crown jewels”.
Märtha’s daughter, Princess Astrid, borrowed them on some occasions when she was first lady of Norway, but since 1968 they have been worn by her sister-in-law, Queen Sonja. (The portrait of the Queen is by Cathrine Wessel/the Royal Court).

Book news: Swedish royal weddings

I have been spending some days in Stockholm and while there I learnt about an upcoming book which seems interesting. Lena Rangström, who works at the Royal Armoury, has written En brud för kung och fosterland - Kungliga svenska bröllop från Gustav Vasa till Carl XVI Gustaf, which will be published by Atlantis in early March and run to 448 pages. The book deals with Swedish royal weddings since the 16th century and will look at both the political significance, the negotiations behind the marriages and the ceremonies in connection with the weddings.
The cover shows a detail of Per Krafft the Younger’s painting of the wedding of Crown Prince Oscar and Princess Joséphine of Leuchtenberg on 19 June 1823.
The book will be closely related to a major exhibiton at the Royal Armoury titled “Bröllop för kung och fosterland” (“Weddings for king and country”), which will include the museum’s unique collection of royal wedding dresses from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The exhibition will be opened on 19 May, a month before the wedding of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling, and close on 3 October.

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.

New books: Herman Lindqvist on Crown Princess Victoria

Two months after his very bad biography of Carl XIV Johan was published, the prolific Swedish journalist Herman Lindqvist is now out with his 51st book – this time Crown Princess Victoria is his victim.
Lindqvist, who is known to hold inflated ideas about his own importance, boasts in the preface that he “for some years” has had “the privilege to talk history with Victoria. Together we have gone through Sweden’s entire history with focus on our regents, their lives and work, both their private lives and their lifework, their merits and their faults”. It must be said that this does not auger well for the future head of state’s knowledge and understanding of history.
“Herman Lindqvist might be called court historian [...]. But he is as much the Swedish people’s historian [...]”, we read on the cover. However, Lindqvist is as little a historian as I am a brain surgeon. He has written a number of bestselling books on history which certainly have helped raise the Swedish people’s interest in history. But his books are not based on original research, he finds it hard to decide what is relevant and what is unimportant, they often have a very simplistic view of historical events and processes and are mostly packed with factual mistakes.
Victoria – Drottning med tiden (published by Bonnier Fakta in November) is a hagiography of the good old sort. No-one is as unique as Crown Princess Victoria and no-one is such a wonderful person. If so, it would have to be her brave and remarkable fiancé Daniel Westling.
Lindqvist puts a lot of creativity into informing us about what is so very unique about these two people and in doing so chooses so narrow criteria that only they can fit into them. “Never has an ordinary Swedish man received a ducal title”, Lindqvist writes. As ducal titles are linked to succession rights and Victoria is the first princess with succession rights to marry, this is true, but a rather obvious fact. It becomes quite tiresome when he gets on and on like this and it reminds me a little of a magazine which recently proclaimed that Barack Obama was “the first Afro-American world leader to receive the Nobel Peace Prize”. (Well, he is the first black US President so I guess he might as well be described as the first Afro-American world leader to tie his shoestrings).
Some of these statements are even debatable. “Never has a Swedish heir to the throne become engaged to a non-royal, even non-noble – and yet kept the position as heir”, Lindqvist enthuses. That might seem true, as Victoria’s father was already king when he married a commoner. However, Prince Bertil was first in line to the throne when he married a commoner in 1976 and remained heir presumptive even after the wedding and until the birth of Crown Prince Carl Philip in 1979.
This book is written in a pompous, yet rather naïve manner. Occasionally what the Crown Princess said in a couple of interviews with Lindqvist in June is quoted, but it seems she had little of particular interest to say to him. The only thing I found of some interest is that she says that she and Prince Carl Philip have never discussed the events of 1979-1980 whereby he ceased being Crown Prince and she bypassed him in the succession.
The text runs to less than 50 pages, with the remaining 2/3 of the book being made up of photos – some of them quite good. Yet in these 40-something pages Lindqvist manages to make a whole list of factual mistakes – to name a few examples he refers to Princess Christina, Mrs Magnuson as plain “Christina Magnusson” (with the surname spelt wrongly), makes no less than three mistakes when he writes that the Crown Prince of Norway in 2001 married “Mette Marit Tjessim Höjby” (who, incidentally, Lindqvist told us already two years ago that would soon tire of her royal role, file for divorce and leave), describes Queen Josephina as “a king’s daughter from Bavaria” (the King of Bavaria was in fact her maternal grandfather; her father was Viceroy of Italy and later Duke of Leuchtenberg) and says that Victoria’s goddaughter Eléonore, rather than her elder sister Elisabeth, is “Hereditary Princess of Belgium”.
The parents of Queen Louise are described as “wholly German” although her father was a British subject. According to Herman Lindqvist the birth of the future Gustaf V in 1858 was the last royal birth to take place with official witnesses in an adjacent room, but this tradition did in fact continue for another five decades. We also learn that several Swedish princes have attended universities and colleges, “but they never completed their studies with exams”. Except for the fact that Prince Sigvard did.
Crown Princess Victoria tells us that Carl XIV Johan is her “favourite king in the history of Sweden”, an opinion, I could add, she seems to share with all other Bernadottes. Having made the monumental discovery, while writing his previous book, that the future Carl XIV Johan actually received only the name Jean Bernadotte at the time of his birth – a fact which has only been known to other biographers and readers at least since the publication of Fredrik Ulrik Wrangel’s book Från Jean Bernadottes ungdom as recently as 120 years ago – Lindqvist now ludicrously insists on referring to him as “Jean (Baptiste) Bernadotte”.
I was also quite startled to read that Crown Princess Victoria “shares her interest in military affairs with her namesake and great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, married to Gustaf V”. For the sake of Sweden I sincerely hope that this is only a sign that Lindqvist is ignorant of how far the late Queen’s military interests went and not that Crown Princess Victoria intends to follow in her ancestress’s war-mongering footsteps.
Lindqvist ends this book, as he did his last one, by stating: “Today there is no dynasty in any country in Europe, indeed not in the whole world, where the same branch of the same family has sat on the throne as long [as the Bernadottes] without interruption, where the regent has never been chased into exile for reasons of internal or foreign politics and has never been forced to see his country at war, but where the dynasty has been able to continue reigning over a free and peaceful people in an independent state”. No matter how many times Lindqvist repeats this it remains untrue.
The current British dynasty has been on the throne since 1714, 104 years longer than the Bernadottes, and although Britain has been at war several times during those nearly three centuries the dynasty’s rule has not been interrupted by those wars. One may correctly point out that it is not the same branch of the British dynasty, as the throne passed from George IV to his brother, from William IV to his niece and from Edward VIII to his brother. But, even though Herman Lindqvist chooses to ignore it, the same happened for the Bernadottes when Carl XV was succeeded by his brother Oscar II.
One may wonder if Lindqvist tries to cover this up when he refers to Carl XV and Queen Lovisa as ancestors of Crown Princess Victoria – in fact she is not descended from them at all, but from Carl XV’s brother.