Åke Heed

It has been a long time since Mary and I scuba dived together on Sulawesi, and I’ve missed her. Last Sunday the weather was good, and I thought I’d fly to Landskrona where we could meet.

We had agreed we’d go to the Landskrona Castle, and I did a quick overflying to see it from air.

I landed in ESML, and soon Mary and friends from the Malmö Sportsdykkarklubb arrived. Mary posing in a pilot seat:

We drove to the Landskrona Castle. Modern art in the surrounding park:

With Martin and René in front of the monument to the Danish King Christian XI:

A walk alongside the beach:

The entrance to Citadellet, the Landskrona Slott:

The Citadel in Landskrona was built in 1549-1559 by the Danish King Christian III as a defence fortification. It is Sweden’s only preserved earthwork fortress, and it is one of the Nordic region’s best preserved 16th century fortresses.

Its thick walls witnessed many historical events, and also some horrors. Prisoners were thrown down through a hatch into the dungeon in the old western tower. If they survived the 4-5 meter fall, a slow death awaited them: there was neither any daylight or any way out.

During the 19th century the Citadel was used as a prison, first for prisoners of war and later for life-term prisoners. Around 1900 until 1940 a part of the fortress served as a forced labour institution for vagrant women.

Today, there is a recreational area with a put-and- take fishing lake, a craft shop, a museum exhibition, and a café.

One can have a delightful walk around the castle. There is a lot to see. On the photo below is a statue of Selma Lagerlöf by Jonas Högström (2009). Selma Lagerlöf was a remarkable woman; the first female writer to win a Nobel Prize in literature, 1909.

Sweden’s oldest allotment-garden area (that is an attraction in itself) resides on the castle’s territory.

This is the most cheerful wind vane I’ve ever seen:

On the entrance to one of the houses there was a poem:

The poem is written by Åke Heed, a Swedish writer, who – as I understood from his website http://www.akeheed.se/ – lives in Landskrona, and most likely owns that romantic blue house on the photo above.

The poem is very beautiful, but quite difficult to translate. With the help of my Swedish colleagues we concluded it is about nature and a silent moment in life.

Spring flowers… They have been on their way for long; the snow and frost were keeping coming back again and again:

We returned back to The Castle, and appreciated its view before leaving:

One more nice sculpture in the park:

We went for a stroll in the centre of Landskrona. Landskrona city hall building is from 1884, built in red brick, with stepped gables and the Gothic window arches; a beautiful example of the architecture of national romanticism: