Free Republic

(restricted; link only)

In 1787, Russian Empress Catherine Romanov the Great visited Crimea. Her tour guide was her lover Prince Grigory Potemkin. The Prince's estates in Crimea were shoddy and run down. To give her majesty the impression that all was well and that Crimea was pristine and beautiful, he erected portable settlements and facades along the river that her boat would be travelling. The deception worked, The middle aged aristocrat impressed the Middle aged Empress and Prince Grigory curried favor with the empress. In reality, behind the facade, Grigory's subjects lived in abject poverty and misery. An Austrian delegation toured Potemkin's...

Sweden, Denmark and Norway have been hit by a series of car fires during the summer months, and the violence has surged in force. Express.co.uk reported on Monday that police in Malmö, in south Sweden, was desperately trying to re-establish control over the city. Shocking footage of violent fires blazing throughout the town over the weekend is only a taste of the growing violence emerging as tensions are grow in the area. Police said the arsonist attacks were sparked by the force’s crack down on organised criminal activity in the district. Officer Erik Jansåker said: “This, in my opinion, is...

His collegiate followers are receptive to Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders exhortations that the United States should be more like Sweden and its Scandinavian neighbors. Yet and still, the self-identified socialist should be careful what he asks for: He may not want to get it. "Although Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have social-welfare states, they outrank the United States on a variety of other economic-freedom indices calculated by the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute; they have, for example, less business regulation, lower corporate tax rates, and more trade freedom," Emily Ekins writes in the May 23, 2016 issue of National...

Bronze tools found in Sweden dating from 3,600 years ago were made using copper from the Mediterranean, archaeologists have shown. They now also believe that rock carvings of ships found in Bohuslan, Sweden were visual documentation of trade between ancient Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. Most of the copper circulating in Bronze Age Europe apparently originated from Sicily, Sardinia, the Iberian peninsula - and Cyprus, going by isotope analysis... The precious copper was exchanged for Nordic amber, which was as cherished as gold in Mycenaean Greece and in the prehistoric Middle East... The ancient Cypriot copper industry produced relatively pure stuff,...

… The White House says the leaders of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden will meet with Obama at the White House on May 13. The summit will include talks on environmental initiatives, nuclear security and countering violent extremism. …

Obama became annoyed... President Obama’s favorite journalist Jeffrey Goldberg made headlines in Israel when The Atlantic published his latest article about the President. In his lengthy piece titled “The Obama Doctrine,” Goldberg gave an overview of Obama’s foreign policy and discussed the President’s disillusionment with the attempts to change the Middle East for the better. Yes, Obama really thought that his policies in this problematic region would bring a positive change when he entered the White House at the beginning of 2008. “This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East,”...

200,000 fish bones discovered in and around a pit in Sweden suggest that the people living in the area more than 9000 years ago were more settled and cultured than we previously thought. Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science suggests people were storing large amounts of fermented food much earlier than experts thought. The new paper reveals the earliest evidence of fermentation in Scandinavia, from the Early Mesolithic time period, about 9,200 years ago. The author of the study, from Lund University in Sweden, say the findings suggest that people who survived by foraging for food were actually...

By Adam Taylor March 18, 2015 Follow @mradamtaylor (Statens historiska museum / Christer Ahlin) In the modern-era, Scandinavian countries have become known for their sometimes awkward embrace of migrants from the Arab and Muslim world. But the history behind that relationship goes back far further than you might expect.Consider the case of a ring discovered in a Viking grave in Birka, a historic trading center in what is now Sweden. The woman in the grave died in the 9th century and was discovered around a thousand years later by the famous Swedish archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe, who spent years excavating...

A woman was left gobsmacked when she learned the gold ring she stumbled across in a field was 2,000 years old. "I walk through that field several times a week. At first I thought it was one of the little rings we put around the chickens’ feet," Camilla Lundin, 51, told The Local. "I thought it was strange that it was so far away from home." Lundin took the ring home and showed her husband, who also didn't believe it was anything special. But Lundin took a picture which she sent to her brother, who immediately told her it was...

9 March 2007 Crystal amulet poses question on early Christianity An overlooked crystal amulet in the National Museum suggests new understandings about Christianity's origins in Denmark King Harold Bluetooth brought Christianity to Denmark roughly 1100 years ago. At least that's what he declared on the Jelling Stone located in Jutland: 'King Haraldr ordered this monument made in memory of Gormr, his father, and in memory of Thyrvé, his mother; that Haraldr who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.' A tiny crystal amulet in the National Museum's archives suggests something quite different though, that...

1/20/05Danish Archaeologists in Search of Vikings in Iran Tehran, Jan. 20 (Iranian Cultural Heritage News Agency) – Researchers from the Copenhagen Museum in Denmark have traveled to the coasts of the Caspian Sea, northern Iran, in search of clues of relationships between Iranians and Vikings. A few years ago, a researcher from the Copenhagen Museum, Nadia Haupt, discovered more than one thousand coins and relics that did not belong to the Danish or other Scandinavian cultures, and therefore set to find out more about the historical roots of the Danish civilization. The ancient items that took the attention of experts...

Archaeologists from the University of York have played a key role in Anglo-Danish research which has suggested the dawn of the Viking Age may have been much earlier -- and less violent -- than previously believed. The study by Dr Steve Ashby, of the Department of Archaeology at York, working with colleagues from York and Aarhus University, identified the first signs of the Viking Age around 70 years before the first raid on England. Previously, the start of the Viking Age has been dated to a June 793 raid by Norwegian Vikings on Lindisfarne. But the new research published in...

In August 2014 a hobby archaeologist found a Viking Age sword with metal detector in a field in Skaun, just south of Trondheim in Central Norway. Now, archaeologists have examined the finding and have some exciting news about the owner. Having examined the grave, archaeologists at the NTNU Museum of Natural History and Archaeology in Trondheim tell NRK that it is dated to about the year 950. In addition to the sword, researchers found the remains of a shield. 'We have not managed to find out who owned the sword, but we know that he was a well traveled man",...

It was only when the coin was later identified as Viking that the game heated up. By then poor Mellegren -- who, Beachcombing must say was someone with a reputation for integrity -- had passed away. Beachcombing has no illusions about much of the nonsense written about pre-Columbian visits to North America. But in this case he would give a thumb and a half followed by two cheers and three quarters. There is a good chance that this really is what it seems: A European coin that found its way to North America in the twelfth century. Minted in Norway,...

Swedes find Viking-era Arab coinsThe Arab coins reveal where they were minted and the date Swedish archaeologists have discovered a rare hoard of Viking-age silver Arab coins near Stockholm's Arlanda airport. About 470 coins were found on 1 April at an early Iron Age burial site. They date from the 7th to 9th Century, when Viking traders travelled widely. There has been no similar find in that part of Sweden since the 1880s. Most of the coins were minted in Baghdad and Damascus, but some came from Persia and North Africa, said archaeologist Karin Beckman-Thoor. The team from the Swedish...

Archaeologists have discovered a Roman cemetery from about 300 A.D. in suburban Copenhagen with about 30 graves, a newspaper reported Wednesday. "It is something special and rare in Denmark to have so many (ancient Roman) graves in one place," archaeologist Rune Iversen was quoted as saying by the Roskilde Dagblad newspaper. The graveyard's exact location in Ishoej, southwest of downtown Copenhagen, was being kept secret until the archaeologists from the nearby Kroppedal Museum have completed their work, the newspaper wrote... Archaeologists found necklaces and other personal belongings, as well as ceramics for containing food. "It shows that we're dealing with...

Graves hint at contact with Romans Published: 8th November 2006 19:18 CET Archaeologists excavating ancient graves in western Sweden have found shards from ceramic vessels made in the Roman Empire, in a find that could challenge assumptions about contacts between people in Sweden and the Romans. The graves in Stenungsund, around 45 kilometres north of Gothenburg, have been dated to between the years 1 and 300 AD. The remains of burned bones from two people were found, along with the pieces of ceramic. "There are pieces from four or five vessels in each grave, and we have never previously found...

This fifth or sixth century A.D. statue of the Buddha from northern India was found in a Viking treasure horde on the Swedish island of Helgö. Globalization is clearly not a recent phenomenon... [F]ew people got around as much as the Vikings. From their Scandinavian coves they visited, raided, traded with and settled in lands from Newfoundland to Baghdad. They conquered Britain, terrorized Ireland and France, settled Iceland, raided Spain and ranged throughout the Mediterranean basin. They established a major presence in Russia, the Ukraine and the Crimea, sending their longboats down the Volga into the Black Sea. They raided...

Viking treasure hoard yields astounding finds 06/24/2002 STOCKHOLM: Four years ago, a farmer digging in his fields in Sweden's Baltic island of Gotland came across a Viking coin. He called a friend from the local museum, and together they soon uncovered another 150 Viking relics. But the crops growing in the fields hindered their work and they gave up. The following summer, with crops that year infected by lice, they resumed their search - and on July 16, 1999, came across the biggest Viking-period treasure hoard so far discovered. It had been lying there for about 1,100 years. The Spillings...