The Secrets of Uppsala

You tilt your head back — and keep tilting. Uppsala Cathedral rises 118.7 metres above you, making it the tallest church in all of Scandinavia. Construction began around 1270, when French architects arrived to build something that would rival the great cathedrals of Europe. It took 165 years. The consecration finally came in 1435, and even then the towers weren't finished.

Step inside and walk toward the eastern end. There, behind gilded ironwork, lies the Vasa Chapel — the resting place of Gustav Vasa, the king who broke Sweden free from Danish rule and from the Catholic Church. His tomb was completed in 1583, and the marble effigies of Gustav and his two queens still gaze upward at the painted vault. But this cathedral holds more than kings. In a side chapel you'll find the relics of Saint Erik, Sweden's patron saint, whose skull has rested here since 1273. And in the nave, a simple floor slab marks the grave of Carl Linnaeus — the man who named nature itself — buried here in 1778.

Standing in the shadow of the Cathedral, Holy Trinity Church has always been the underdog. First mentioned in a will from 1302, this grey stone church was the parish church of ordinary Uppsala — the bakers, the tanners, the students who couldn't afford a pew in the grand cathedral next door. But step inside, and you'll discover this church holds something the Cathedral does not: the paintings of Albertus Pictor.

Albertus Pictor — 'Albert the Painter' — was a German-Swedish artist who worked across central Sweden in the late 1400s. His frescoes cover the vaulted ceilings of Holy Trinity with scenes of heaven and hell, saints and sinners, rendered in rich reds and blues. Look closely at the ceiling near the choir: Death plays chess with a knight, a motif that Ingmar Bergman would later borrow for his film The Seventh Seal. These paintings survived the Reformation, survived fires, survived centuries of whitewash. They were only rediscovered and restored in the 19th century.

Look up at the roofline of this mustard-yellow building and you'll see something unusual — a dome that doesn't belong to a church. That copper cupola, added in 1662, houses one of Europe's most extraordinary rooms: the Anatomical Theatre. The polymath Olaus Rudbeck designed it himself — concentric rings of steep benches encircling a single dissection table, lit from above by windows in the dome.

Rudbeck was a professor of medicine, but also a botanist, architect, and irrepressible dreamer who tried to prove that Sweden was the lost Atlantis. In this very room, he dissected executed criminals before audiences of students, professors, and visiting dignitaries, revealing the mysteries of the human body in an age when anatomy was still half-science, half-theatre. The building itself was commissioned by King Gustavus Adolphus in the 1620s, who wanted Uppsala to rival Leiden and Padua. Today, the museum holds Viking helmets, Egyptian mummies, and one of the most personal relics in the history of science: Anders Celsius's own thermometer — the original instrument, with his handwritten markings.

The columned façade of Carolina Rediviva looks like a Greek temple dropped onto a Swedish hillside. Sweden's oldest university library building was completed in 1841, but the collection inside reaches back to 1620, when King Gustav II Adolf founded the library. Inside, in a climate-controlled display case, lies the library's greatest treasure: the Codex Argenteus, the Silver Bible.

This is not just any book. Written around 520 AD, probably for the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great in Ravenna, its text is penned in silver and gold ink on purple-dyed calfskin. It contains the only substantial surviving text in the Gothic language — a 4th-century Bible translation by Bishop Wulfila. The manuscript's journey to Uppsala reads like a thriller: looted from Prague by Swedish soldiers during the Thirty Years' War in 1648, it ended up with Queen Christina, then traveled to the Netherlands, before Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie bought it and donated it to Uppsala in the 1660s. In 1995, pages were stolen from this very display case. They were recovered a month later — in a storage locker at Stockholm Central Station.

The pink-walled fortress above you was built to intimidate. King Gustav Vasa ordered its construction in 1549 on the highest point in Uppsala, designed with massive bastions in the Italian fortification style. From here, cannons could dominate the cathedral, the university, and the entire city below. The message was clear: the crown rules, not the church.

But the castle's most dramatic moment came a century later, on June 6, 1654. Queen Christina of Sweden — one of the most brilliant and unconventional monarchs in European history — stood in the great hall and abdicated the throne. The ceremony required each piece of regalia to be removed. But when it came time for the crown, Per Brahe, the nobleman assigned the task, refused to move. Whether from loyalty, shock, or defiance, he stood frozen. So Christina reached up and removed the crown herself. She gave her farewell speech in a faltering voice, changed into a simple white taffeta dress, and within days had fled Sweden disguised in men's clothing. She rode through Denmark as 'Count Dohna' and never returned. She converted to Catholicism and spent the rest of her life in Rome.

You're standing before the grandest academic building in Scandinavia. Uppsala University was founded in 1477, making it the oldest university in the Nordic countries and one of the oldest in the world. But for its first 400 years, it had no proper main building. That changed in 1879, when King Oscar II arrived to lay the cornerstone — in pouring rain.

Architect Herman Teodor Holmgren designed the building in an Italian Renaissance Beaux-Arts style, with a grand ceremonial hall that still hosts doctoral dissertations and the awarding of Nobel Prize-adjacent honours. The construction was plagued by budget problems and the treacherous ground — the steep hillside and old castle foundations made every foundation pour an adventure. When it was finally inaugurated in May 1887, it was worth the wait. Walk around to the main entrance and look up at the façade: the carved inscriptions and medallions celebrate the giants of Uppsala scholarship. Inside, the Aula Magna features ceiling paintings and the sense that every word spoken here carries the weight of five centuries of thought.

Push open the wooden gate on Svartbäcksgatan and step into a different century. This is Sweden's first botanical garden, founded in 1655 by the irrepressible Olaus Rudbeck. But it was transformed into something immortal in 1741, when a 34-year-old professor named Carl Linnaeus took over as director. The garden was in ruins when he arrived. Within a few years, he had rebuilt it entirely, arranging over a thousand plant species according to his revolutionary 'sexual system' of classification — grouping plants by their reproductive organs.

The world had never seen anything like it. Linnaeus's system of binomial nomenclature — giving every species a two-part Latin name — became the universal language of biology. It still is. Every species you've ever heard of, from Homo sapiens to Tyrannosaurus rex, carries a name in the system Linnaeus invented in this garden. Walk through the beds laid out exactly as they were in 1745, following Linnaeus's own design sketches. Beside the garden stands his home, now a museum, where he lived with his wife Sara Elisabeth and their growing family, surrounded by pressed flowers and handwritten manuscripts.

The slightly crooked yellow building on Svartbäcksgatan looks unassuming, but it's one of the most important scientific addresses in Sweden. Anders Celsius — professor of astronomy at Uppsala since 1730 — persuaded the university to buy this medieval stone house and had an observatory constructed on its roof. He both lived and worked here, conducting observations that would help confirm Newton's theory that the Earth is flattened at the poles.

But Celsius is remembered for something more everyday: the temperature scale. In 1742, he presented his paper proposing a 100-degree thermometer to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. There was just one catch — his scale was inverted. Celsius set the boiling point of water at zero degrees and the freezing point at 100. It was his colleague Carl Linnaeus (yes, the same Linnaeus from the garden up the street) who flipped the scale to the version we use today. Celsius died of tuberculosis in 1744, aged just 42, in this very building. His original thermometer — with his own handwritten wire markings — survives in Gustavianum, just a few hundred metres from here.

The sprawling Botanical Garden you're entering exists because the original Linnaeus Garden became swampy and cramped. By the late 18th century, Uppsala's botanists needed more room. Carl Peter Thunberg — one of Linnaeus's most accomplished students, who had traveled to Japan and South Africa collecting specimens — persuaded King Gustav III to donate the castle grounds to the university for a new botanical garden.

On August 17, 1787, the king signed the grant. To mark the occasion, 128 cannons were fired in salute — because this was the 18th century, and that's how you celebrated a garden. Gustav III personally laid the foundation stone for the garden's Orangery. Today the garden spans 13 hectares and holds over 13,000 species from every continent. The Tropical Greenhouse is a particular marvel — step inside on a January morning and you're suddenly standing in a rainforest while Uppsala shivers outside. The baroque garden near the Orangery is designed in precise geometric patterns that echo the rational spirit of the Enlightenment.

The walk or bus ride to Gamla Uppsala takes you five kilometres north of the city, but fifteen centuries back in time. Three enormous earthen mounds rise from the flat landscape — the Royal Mounds, dated to the 5th and 6th centuries. According to Norse legend, Thor, Odin, and Freyr are buried here. Archaeology tells a different but equally dramatic story: the Eastern Mound, excavated in 1847, contained cremated human remains, gold fragments, and ornate buckles. The Middle Mound has never been opened.

But the mounds are only half the story. Gamla Uppsala was the site of the Temple at Uppsala, described by the 11th-century chronicler Adam of Bremen as the most important pagan sanctuary in Scandinavia. Every nine years, a great sacrificial festival was held here: nine males of every species — including humans — were sacrificed and their bodies hung from trees in a sacred grove. The temple was destroyed around 1080 by King Inge the Elder, and a Christian church was built directly on its foundations. Under the present 12th-century stone church, archaeologists have found the remains of large wooden structures — possibly the temple itself. Stand between the mounds at twilight and you'll understand why this place still carries a charge that no museum can replicate.