Guide offers local a tour of pandemics past
With tourists confined at home and locals avoiding crowds, a guide is trying to boost business with tours of Stockholm’s previous pandemics, from the black death to cholera outbreaks.
On a sunny Saturday, Mike Anderson led a group of history buffs on a “Plague Walk” through Stockholm’s Old Town, pausing by churches and in the shadows of narrow orange and yellow houses that line the streets to point out how the city was marked by pandemics past.
“It’s quite interesting when you take things that happen today and connect it to history and see that people have been through this before,” said Anderson, 46.
Dressed in a long, rough cotton shirt over his clothes – along with a long, beaked mask, his costume for the tour – Anderson led the group through the cobbled streets.
Four friends had dressed in black for the occasion, one of whom had fashioned a replica of a mask worn by plague doctors in the Middle Ages from a paper bag, featuring a long beak and narrow eye holes.
They listened as Anderson took them back to the outbreak of bubonic plague that wracked the country in the 1350s, killing up to one third of its population.
Further on, they stopped in shaded churchyards to hear stories about a plague that swept through Sweden and the Baltic region in the 1710s and an outbreak of cholera in the mid-19th century.
One visitor was unsure what parallels to draw with today’s coronavirus pandemic, but glad of the afternoon out.
“I had studied a bit before, but there was a lot of new things” in the tour, 27-year-old Stockholm resident Vera said.
Anderson’s business dropped off as concerns over Covid-19 mounted and governments imposed measures to prevent the virus’s spread from February onwards. Sweden has reported nearly 5,000 deaths from the virus.
Anderson now plans to offer the tour more regularly.
“Most of all, I want them to have entertainment for one hour,” he said.