Uppsala

Almost everything popularly known about pre-Christian Uppsala comes from a few paragraphs written around 1075 by Adam of Bremen, a cleric who had not been there and who was writing about the mission field of his own archbishopric. He describes a temple entirely covered in gold, holding three images with Thor in the middle and Odin and Fricco beside him, priests assigned to each, and a festival every nine years at which nine males of every living kind were sacrificed and hung in a grove beside the building, with a note that a Christian informant had seen the bodies. A tree that never lost its leaves and a spring for drowning offerings complete the picture.

The account has to be read for what it is: a hostile description of a rival religion, written to justify a mission, by an author who says himself that he had it from others. Archaeology at Gamla Uppsala has found large royal burial mounds, a great hall on a terrace, and long rows of massive posts running across the site, but no building matching Adam's temple has been identified beneath the medieval church.

What is not in doubt is that the place was a centre of royal power and public assembly for the Svear, with a thing that met there and mounds raised over cremation burials containing gold, glass and imported goods. The atlas records Adam's temple as reported rather than established, and the mounds and the assembly as attested.

Sweden's conversion was slow and contested, and Uppsala is where the change of regime is legible. An archbishopric was established at the old settlement in 1164, and a century later the see was moved a few kilometres south to the present town, where a brick cathedral on the French model was begun. It is the largest church in Scandinavia and holds the shrine of Erik, the king venerated as Sweden's patron, along with the tombs of later monarchs.

The Reformation came as a royal measure under Gustav Vasa, but its final shape was settled at Uppsala. A national synod met in the cathedral in 1593, after a king had attempted to move Swedish worship back towards Rome, and resolved that the Church of Sweden would hold to the three ancient creeds and the Augsburg Confession, that the earlier liturgy was rejected, and famously that Sweden would now be of one mind. The decision made Lutheranism the settled religion of the kingdom and was treated afterwards as a founding document of the national church.

The university had been founded in 1477 and became the training ground for its clergy, as well as the home of Linnaeus and of Celsius. The Church of Sweden remained a state church until 2000, and it is administered from Uppsala under an archbishop; it ordained its first women priests in 1960 and has since authorised marriage services for same sex couples, decisions that have been debated across the wider Lutheran world.