This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Sweden gathers two cities that record its religious history on either side of conversion, one a pre Christian cult site turned archbishopric and the other a medieval double monastery built around a Swedish saint.
Uppsala is described by Adam of Bremen, writing in the eleventh century and not from first hand knowledge, as the site of a temple holding images of Thor, Odin and Freyr where sacrifices, including human ones, were made every ninth year. Gamla Uppsala, the older settlement nearby, has royal burial mounds and was the assembly site of the Svear. After conversion the archbishopric of Sweden was established there, and the Uppsala Synod of 1593, held in the cathedral, committed the Swedish church to the Augsburg Confession.
Vadstena is built around the abbey Bridget of Sweden founded in the fourteenth century after a series of visions instructed her to establish a new order, the Bridgettines, housing both men and women under one roof in separate quarters, an unusual double monastery structure for its period. Bridget herself died in Rome in 1373 before seeing the abbey completed, but her daughter Catherine oversaw its founding and Bridget's own remains were brought back and enshrined there after her 1391 canonization, making Vadstena the center of one of medieval Scandinavia's most significant home grown saint's cults. The abbey became the motherhouse of the Bridgettine order's expansion across northern Europe until the Swedish Reformation closed it in the sixteenth century.
Between a temple Adam of Bremen never saw firsthand and an abbey built for a saint whose own remains still lie there, the two cities carry Sweden's religious memory from before conversion and after it.