Strong winds and heavy seas are forecast for our 90-kilometre ferry journey from mainland Sweden to the island of Gotland. In the middle of the Baltic Sea, bells ring out, the ferry slows and passengers gather on the foredeck. In fading light, the bishop of Gotland recites a poem in memory of the eighty Gotlanders lost when a Russian submarine torpedoed the civilian ferry, Hassa, 70 years ago. Ancestors of the dead cast a wreath into the grey and gravid sea.
Visby, Gotland’s capital, is an intact medieval walled city. Its streets are gracious with muted yellow and pink gabled merchant houses. Once-magnificent churches, ransacked during the Reformation, lie in ruins.
Bossa, a friend of friends, drives us north to Fårö, the island where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked. It’s a beautiful, brooding place of pinewoods, grey gravel beaches, oiled black fisherman’s huts and tarred black boats. Raukar, great limestone monuments carved by the sea and wind, tower over the coastline. There are white swans on the water, pheasants flying low over the moorlands and nests high up in the branches of bare trees.
That evening we dine in a small, white-tiled cafe, enjoying delicious Baltic Sea seafood. As we eat, we catch drifts of conversations in Gotlandic, a Swedish dialect with traces of the island’s original language.
The next morning, the landscape glinting with ice, we drive south to the edge of the known world. The earth’s shadow, ethereal blue above the dark sea. The forecast of freezing temperatures bringing joy to the Gotlanders heart, longing as they are for a ‘real’ winter.
As we travel, we gaze out on windmills, stone boat graves, wild Gotland ponies, thatched farm buildings and lambsgifts (small thatched triangular shelters for the famed Gotland sheep). We stop to explore an old sandstone quarry from the time Gotland was a great trading power and visit a beautiful medieval church.
The coastal landscapes are breathtaking. On the offshore islands of Greater and Lesser Karls nest thousands of migratory Guillemots and Razorbills. Closer to shore, Cormorants and Terns dive for fish.
By early afternoon, mist settles on the still-damp earth. Sea eagles soar above the whitecap-grey, limestone cliffs. A red fox lies dead, curled in a cave by the water’s edge. We follow the east coast road to a red-striped lighthouse. Its light gleams in the darkening sky.
Gotland, Sweden, late autumn, 2014
Postcards from the Lost World are from places we roamed before borders closed and overseas travel ceased. As we sit out the long interlude between journeys, we reimagine past wanderings and dream of a time before this time began.
See our other postcards from the lost world: Cinque Terre, Jodhpur, Achill Island and Istanbul.
Lovely. I can feel the cold. And its beauty.