{"id":1126,"date":"2017-07-18T16:41:55","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T21:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/historicandrewpetersonfarmstead.wordpress.com\/?p=1126"},"modified":"2019-02-16T21:51:56","modified_gmt":"2019-02-17T03:51:56","slug":"birka-and-uppsala","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carvercountyhistoricalsociety.org\/wpcchs\/andrew-peterson-farmstead\/birka-and-uppsala\/","title":{"rendered":"Birka and Uppsala"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before leaving Stockholm, I traveled for two hours via boat to the World Heritage site Birka.\u00a0 Birka is one of the places on my trip that I was adamant to visit.\u00a0 This island to the west of Stockholm was an important trading center for the Vikings, which handled goods from Scandinavia a<\/span>s well as Central and Eastern Europe and the Orient. During the tour we learned that Vikings were not all the raiders that we so often associate with Vikings. Per the Swedish tour guide, the more vicious Vikings were Danish. From various comments I learned there is still a friendly feud between the Swedes and the Danes.\u00a0 The Vikings also did not have horns on their helmets.<\/p>\n

The island has many Viking burial mounds.\u00a0 The mounds were used before Vikings became Christians and changed their practices to burying people in a more traditional cemetery.\u00a0 The mounds are interesting in that you can tell the importance of a person by the size of the mound.\u00a0 Things that looked like rocks to me were actually markers for the mounds.\u00a0 Women mounds were marked by\u00a0 round rocks.<\/p>\n

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