Gotlands Museum

Viking picture stones and the world-record Spillings Hoard

The main museum on the island holds one of Sweden's most significant medieval collections. The highlights are the picture stones — enormous carved limestone slabs from the Viking Age and earlier, covered with mythological scenes and runic inscriptions that predate the runestones found elsewhere in Scandinavia. The museum also has an outstanding collection of medieval gold and silver hoards, many unearthed from Gotland's fields.

The Battle of Visby section displays armoured skeletons recovered from the mass graves outside the walls — Gotlandic farmers cut down by Valdemar Atterdag's Danish professionals in 1361. The wounds visible on the bones are graphic and unforgettable. The museum occupies a set of interconnected historic buildings on Strandgatan, inside the city wall. Allow at least two hours; longer if you read the labels.

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The museum displays the Spillings Hoard — found in 1999 under a single Gotland farm field — which at 65 kilograms is the largest Viking silver hoard ever unearthed anywhere in the world. Most of it consists of Arabic dirhams, evidence that Gotland's traders were reaching all the way to Baghdad in the 9th and 10th centuries.