It is a clement, early summer evening in Visby, and German, Finnish and Danish voices mingle in the air with eurotrash music coming from a bar on Stora Torget, literally the “Great Square”. Some teenagers are walking among the nearby ruins of St Karin’s church. “It’s like Gotland’s version of the Tower of Pisa,” one of them says. “Don’t be so stupid,” his friend laughs.
Then there is a crack in the skies above, and a Swedish Gripen fighter jet zooms past, drawing scant attention from the people below cradling glasses of beer and wine. In one corner of the square sits a bar called Ryska Gården, a former Russian trading post with the remnants of a Russian church beneath it. “We’re here on holiday,” says a couple from northern Sweden. “Not to think about war.”
But that is why I’ve come to Gotland, the idyllic 1,200-square-mile Swedish island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. On the one hand, it is one of the tourist pearls of northern Europe with dozens of perfect, white beaches as well as the medieval walled town of Visby. But it is also, in the words of one of the soldiers I meet here, an “unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle of the Baltic”.
Military control of Gotland would threaten not only Sweden, but Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. There are few more strategically important locations in Europe, which is why experts have repeatedly said a Russian invasion of the Baltic states could start here. And yet, for decades before the invasion of Ukraine, Sweden left it all but demilitarised.
This tension is apparent from the very start of my trip. I take the passenger ferry from Nynäshamn, just south of Stockholm, and it’s a typical mix of pensioners and families with young children. Next to me at the front boat sits 81-year-old Greta, who is off to visit friends on Gotland. We talk about everything from her music — she released her debut album on vinyl last year — to her leftish political leanings including opposition to Nato, the western defence alliance to which the Swedish government formally applied for membership in May.
Until this week, the bid had been held up by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who opposes Sweden’s support for a Kurdish militant group in Syria. On June 28, Turkey, Finland and Sweden reached a deal that paves the way for the Nordic countries to join the alliance in the coming weeks.
After three hours of sailing, we’re nearing Visby when I spy another boat starboard. Heading up to the eighth floor deck, I’m joined by dozens of other passengers to gawk at what quickly becomes clear is a warship. It is being circled by two helicopters, presumably for protection.
By chance, I’ve arrived in time to witness a demonstration that Sweden understands Gotland’s significance. Nato is holding Baltops 22, a maritime training exercise in the Baltic, and US and Swedish troops are drilling on the island. I’ve missed the amphibious landings and a Hercules aircraft landing on a civilian road (a fairly common occurrence in Sweden), but repeatedly cross paths with the military over the coming days.
Arriving at Visby harbour, I expect to see dozens of taxis. But there are just three, and two of them are already booked. The Covid-19 pandemic forced many workers off the island. Patricia, my taxi driver, soon establishes why I’m here and offers her take: “We’ve been Danish, then Swedish, now we’re Gotlandic. Maybe we’ll be Russian next! Or maybe we’re safer now with Nato.”
The car moves past pretty wooden house after pretty wooden house, nearly all abundant with purple and white lilacs. Some have signs out front advertising “fresh potatoes” or “asparagus”. We pass a soldier in uniform walking down the road. Patricia says that the local restaurant is offering free food to Ukrainian refugees here as we pull in front of Gotland’s defence museum. A mannequin stands guard in the sentry box amid the tanks and weaponry on display as well as a sign for mjukglass, soft-serve ice cream, hinting at the busier summer days ahead.
Lars-Åke Permerud and Rutger Bandholtz are nursing the customary Swedish mid-afternoon coffee and cinnamon bun. They’re both retired military officers who serve on the museum’s board and now welcome visitors. Gotland only has a population of 61,000. At peak in the late-1990s, the island was also home to 25,000 soldiers and four regiments. Three of those were shut down in 2000 and the final one five years later. Permerud, who is wearing a bright turquoise shirt advertising the Copa del Rey sailing regatta, was the highest-ranking officer on Gotland as head of the home guard from 2007 to 2010. “We thought eternal peace was here,” he says.
In 2020, Sweden began sending soldiers and equipment back to the island, at first using the civilian passenger ferry. “To build up defence again takes a lot of time. You can’t just buy a lot of equipment, you need the personnel. It’s a way for the politicians to buy themselves free from responsibility for their bad decisions from before,” says Bandholtz, clad in a light-blue checked shirt. “If you would have asked me at the end of 2021, I would have said, ‘No’,” Permerud says of joining Nato. “I changed my opinion when Russia invaded Ukraine.” As for Gotland, he says: “We are a little more ready now and a lot more suspicious. But we are not afraid.”
I head for the beach of Tofta, about 20km south of Visby, because it’s reputed to be one of the prettiest on the island, and it’s also where US forces landed the previous day. Along a short stretch of beach there are three abandoned concrete machine gun bunkers, presumably from World War 2. I’ve brought a hammock to sleep in. (Sweden’s “right to roam” allows individuals to camp anywhere, even on private property, so long as they are respectful of nature.) I find some trees amid the sand dunes and fall asleep to bird song, two American warships patrolling the waters in the distance.
The next morning, nearby beach huts disgorge not holidaymakers but army officers taking part in the Nato exercise. I head back into Visby, whose ramparts give it more of a Germanic feel than a Scandinavian one. The narrow streets are a mixture of quaint old houses and shops and restaurants, many with the lightly gaudy feel of tourist traps. On one, I notice an orange and blue sign that reads “Skyddsrum”, air-raid shelter.
Near the harbour, dozens of neat rows of bicycles stand outside Gotland Cykeluthyrning. I’ve decided to hire one to see more of the island. As I pack my panniers, I chat with co-owner Jacob Harlevi, who was raised on Gotland, left for Stockholm as a young man and then later returned with children, a familiar pattern on the island. By the weekend, all of his 800 bikes will be fully booked, as schools from Stockholm descend on Gotland for end-of-year trips. “We have a saying about tourists: it’s nice when they come, and it’s nice when they leave,” he says.
The military, Harlevi notes, is respectful of the tourist industry here, ensuring there are no drills in Visby during peak season. “The military, they scare people. But in reality they protect us,” he says. “Gotland as a strategic place has always been coveted by the Russians, but we’re used to them. We don’t like what they’re doing, but we’re not bothered by it. If you live in it, it feels fully normal.”
He hands me a map showing some bike-friendly routes across the island, and I ask about Nato. Harlevi was anti and is now pro. But he is wary of giving in too much to Turkish demands. “If the price is too high to join Nato to please the Turks, I don’t know if it’s worth it. We take our values very seriously in Sweden. If you go deeper with many Swedes, I’m not sure they are 100 per cent behind [joining].”
Soon I’m out in the countryside, cycling past dried peat bogs dotted with water-conservation warning signs. Harlevi had told me that water scarcity was becoming worse as more tourists flock to the island and because farmers need larger amounts. Two Gripen fighters pass high in the sky. As I ride on, the roadside verges grow more luscious with poppies, cow parsley, buttercups, speedwell and cornflowers in shades of pink, purple, white and red. And there is field after field of bright yellow rapeseed. Suddenly, poking out from the crops, is the kind of austere stone church I later find almost every village has on the island.
Endre is a small settlement but has both a primary and a pre-school as well as the church and a few houses. Soon there are about 30 tanks, armoured vehicles, and personnel carriers rolling down the town’s small tarmac lanes. One of the tanks is forced to brake suddenly as a small red car zips by on the main road.
In a garden draped with fragrant lilacs, two women are watching in bemusement. Gunilla Utas, who lives in Endre, says: “It’s very exciting. We wondered what on earth was happening. We’d just come home from the shopping. It’s unusual.” I move on to the nearby pre-school, which seems unusually quiet. One of the teachers tells me most of the younger children were napping and missed the excitement. But the five- and six-year-olds were watching agog from the playground.
“Some children thought it was the Russians. They were scared,” one of the teachers, Lotta, says. Asked how she explains the situation to the children, another teacher, Marie, says: “There is no war in Sweden. It’s in Ukraine.” Lotta interjects: “The children feel they live in Gotland, not in Sweden.”
I cycle to the next village, Bro. At the Tingsbrogården home for the elderly, a bunch of US soldiers are milling around. So is Hans Håkansson, whose mother had dementia and lived in the home before she died. Håkansson, I discover, was Permerud’s successor as head of the home guard on Gotland and later became chief of staff for the re-established Gotland regiment before retiring last year.
He is waiting for some American tanks, visible down the road, to roll past for the culmination of the exercise in what is dubbed “the battle of Bro”. We speak for a little less than an hour, and the tanks don’t move at all. “The British have a saying for exercises: ‘Hurry up, and wait’,” he says with a glint in his eye.
Håkansson describes the years from 2005 to 2017 as “really sad. The worst thing was all the training areas, the ammunition stores, the underground command and control facilities, all were torn down or given away.” In the 20th century, Gotland was heavily militarised with all landing beaches and ports mined even in peacetime, numerous equipment stores hidden in barns and elsewhere on the island, and significant numbers of tanks, guns and other weaponry stockpiled here, Håkansson says. Fårö, an island off Gotland beloved by film director Ingmar Bergman, was even off limits to all foreigners until 1998, he adds.
Every ex-soldier has his own pet theory on the worst scenario for Gotland. Permerud told me that a series of lightning airstrikes by Russia knocked out key infrastructure and dropped in paratroopers was his nightmare. Håkansson’s involves Russians covertly loading a couple of commercial ships with troops and equipment in somewhere like Syria, sailing into the Baltic and then suddenly detouring off course into Visby.
Fed up waiting for the tanks and intrigued by his comments about Fårö, I decide to head there instead. It takes me until early evening to make it to Fårösund, the narrow channel separating the two islands. Permerud told me British and French ships once ambushed the Russians here during the Crimean war.
A short ferry ride across the strait and the landscape subtly changes. Stone walls line the roads, many fields have quaint thatched barns in them and several farms have “sheepskins for sale” signs at their entrance. I pass Bergman’s gravestone at another church before reaching the splendour of Sudersand, a bay with kilometres of white sand in each direction. I set up my hammock on the beach with just three swans for company under a purple sky that, at this time of year, will only stay dark for four hours.
The next morning, the Fårögården restaurant has a fire blazing for breakfast. I ask a walker about the security situation and get a sharp reply: “We don’t think much about Nato up here, we just get on with life.” Saddle sore, I hitch a ride back to Visby on the local bus with just a few hours to kill before my flight home. It is visibly busier than when I left, and dozens of people are carrying placards with seemingly random pictures of children on them. Two teenagers, perhaps sensing my befuddlement, explain it is high-school graduation day.
This is a Swedish spectacle that has to be seen to be believed. One by one, each of the town’s graduating classes are called on to a balcony overlooking the sea and a crowd of hundreds of family and friends. The placards are usually baby pictures of the graduates. Eric sitting on a potty, Nelli in a clothes basket, Leo asleep in his car seat.
Techno music throbs as one of the classes of about a dozen students comes out on to the balcony. The kids are bouncing up and down, spraying confetti into the cheering crowd. The boys are dressed in dark suits and the girls in white dresses. The boys and girls are dancing. “After three years, after all the shit with Covid, skaaaaaaaaal,” says one of the girls on the balcony, stretching the Swedish word for “cheers” into a cry of joy.
Each graduate gets a series of tchotchkes hung on blue and yellow ribbons — Sweden’s national colours — placed around their necks like Olympians being awarded medals. It’s impossible not to smile. Amid the crowd, I see a girl draped in a red, white and green flag with a yellow sun in the middle. It is the Kurdish flag, a symbol of why Sweden is not yet protected by Nato.
The girl is named Sheyda. “It’s the first time I have worn the flag,” she says. “I was a bit nervous about wearing it, but it’s gone really well.” The mood dips momentarily. “We are a bit afraid,” Sheyda says. “But it feels safe here.”
Richard Milne is the FT’s Nordic and Baltic correspondent
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