Set up in 1477, Uppsala is the oldest university in Sweden. Moreover, Theology – which plays host to the Euroculture programme – is Uppsala’s oldest faculty: 544 and going strong!
There are many traditions, including gasques – formal dinners arranged by the regional student associations, or Nations – and rafting on the Fyris river on suspiciously unseaworthy floats.
The university library dates back to 1620 and offers a wide variety of physical and digital resources. The main library building, Carolina Rediviva, houses precious collections of books, manuscripts, pictures, maps and musical scores. If its books were to be stacked in one pile, they would stand higher than 17 Mount Everests.
Eight Nobel laureates are connected with the university, and notable alumni include astronomer Anders Celsius, physicist Anders Ångström and botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus. With 9 faculties and 50 or so departments, Uppsala houses over 40 000 students and 2 000 Ph.D. students.
Uppsala: The City
Uppsala lies just 70 kilometres north of Stockholm (40 minutes by train) and is only 30 kilometres away from the international airport, Stockholm Arlanda. It is a very green city with good cycle paths and a river, and it is characterised by its university, castle and cathedral, which is the largest in the Nordic countries. The seat of the Swedish church, it still shows traces of its pagan past.
Uppsala is the fourth largest city in Sweden and was once an important trading centre to the Vikings – the burial mounds of Viking chieftains can be found at nearby Gamla Uppsala (Old Uppsala). The Viking centres of Birka (8th century) and Sigtuna (10th century) also lie nearby; Birka is a World Heritage site.
The Uppland region boasts the most runestones in Sweden, dating back 1 000 years and more. A number of them can be found in the grounds just down from the main university building. Following an exhibition in France in the late 1800s, one of the stones was lost to the sea off Le Havre until dredging activities turned up a stone with “funny writing”!
