A short history of Ystad and Österlen

The earliest grand monument in the region stands at Kivik, an hour north‑east of Ystad on the Baltic coast. The cairn called Kungagraven, the King's Grave, is around seventy‑five metres across and dates from roughly the fifteenth century BC. Two farmers stumbled into the central cist in 1748 looking for building stone and broke open a chamber lined with carved slabs showing ships, figures with raised arms, lurs being played, a chariot drawn by two horses with four‑spoked wheels. Nothing else like them is known from a Nordic Bronze Age burial. The archaeologist Gustaf Hallström excavated the site between 1931 and 1933.

Roughly two thousand years later, a stone ship was raised at Kåseberga, ten kilometres south‑east of Ystad. Ales stenar, fifty‑nine boulders set in a long oval sixty‑seven metres in length, has been carbon‑dated by samples from inside the monument to around the sixth or seventh century AD. Whether it was a grave, a cult site, a calendar marking the moon's standstills, or all three, is still argued. For most of this period the area was not Swedish. It was a borderland of the Danish realm, and would remain so for another seven hundred years.

The reason Ystad still looks the way it does is, in part, a piece of nineteenth‑century railway politics. When the Swedish state laid the southern trunk line in the 1850s and 1860s, it ran the route through Lund and Malmö, not through Ystad. A branch line reached the town in 1866, but by then the heavy industrial growth that tore down medieval centres elsewhere in Europe had bypassed it. The population was around 5,000 in 1850, drifted past 10,000 only when a garrison was established in the 1890s, and remained modest for the rest of the century. The old town was not torn down because there was neither money nor reason to tear it down.

What survived is the largest collection of half‑timbered houses in Sweden, around three hundred buildings from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. The oldest known timber‑frame house dates from the 1480s. The most photographed block, Per Helsas Gård, is a courtyard complex assembled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, still described as the only fully preserved half‑timbered courtyard block in the Nordic countries.

For most of its history, Skåne was Danish. The Treaty of Roskilde, signed on 26 February 1658, transferred the province along with Blekinge, Halland, Bohuslän and several Norwegian territories from Denmark‑Norway to Sweden. Article nine promised the Scanians their old laws and customs; the promise did not hold. Scanian law was replaced by Swedish law in 1683, the Swedish church ordinance imposed in 1686.

The province was tested again in the Scanian War of 1675 to 1679, when Danish forces invaded with support from an irregular pro‑Danish guerrilla, the snapphanar, drawn from the peasantry. Swedish reprisals were brutal: an order of 19 April 1678 directed that every farm in Örkened parish be burned and every man capable of using a rifle executed. The war ended in something close to a draw, but the territorial change held. The cultural transfer was slower and is not yet complete. Scanian dialects, with their uvular r and audible diphthongs, still sound to a Stockholmer like Danish that has been tidied and to a Copenhagener like Swedish that has gone slightly wrong.

For most of the twentieth century Ystad was a quiet south‑coast town with a ferry harbour and a regiment. That changed in 1991 with the publication of Mördare utan ansikte, Faceless Killers, the first of Henning Mankell's novels about a melancholic Ystad police inspector named Kurt Wallander. Nine more followed, the last, Den orolige mannen, in 2009. The series was adapted twice for Swedish television in the 1990s and 2000s, and between 2008 and 2016 for the BBC starring Kenneth Branagh, filmed in and around the town.

The shoots used the old anti‑aircraft regiment Lv 4, decommissioned in 1997, as their production base. The site was redeveloped as Ystad Studios from the mid‑2000s and is now one of the larger film facilities in Scandinavia. Its public face, Cineteket, moved into the studio complex in 2018 and holds the props and standing sets from the Wallander productions. Mankell died in 2015.

Half an hour east of Ystad, in flat country above Hammenhög, stands the most complete late‑medieval castle in Scandinavia. Glimmingehus was begun in 1499 for the Danish knight, councillor and admiral Jens Holgersen Ulfstand, to the design of Adam van Düren, the North German master mason who also worked on Lund Cathedral, and was finished around 1506. It is a tall rectangular block of pale Scanian limestone, lower walls 2.4 metres thick, upper walls 1.8, with parapets, murder holes, false doors, dead‑end corridors and a flooded basement.

The castle very nearly came down. In 1676, during the Scanian War, Charles XI ordered Glimmingehus demolished to keep it out of Danish hands. A first attempt with twenty farmers and a second with a hundred and thirty men failed to make any real impression on the walls; the arrival of a Danish‑Dutch fleet at Ystad ended the effort. The Swedish National Heritage Board has administered the building since 1924. Selma Lagerlöf set one of the strongest passages of her 1906 children's book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige here.

The town of Ystad has roughly 20,000 inhabitants; the wider municipality just over 30,000. The ferry harbour runs two long‑established routes: a fast passenger and car service to Rønne on Bornholm, eighty minutes across, operated since 2018 by Bornholmslinjen with the catamaran HSC Express 1, and a longer overnight service to Świnoujście in Poland, around seven hours, run by Polferries on a route that has connected the two ports since the 1970s. The film studios at the old garrison employ several hundred people. In Österlen the permanent population is around forty thousand, and it roughly doubles in July and August.

The old town behind the harbour looks much as it did when Mankell first wrote about it, which is to say much as it did when Per Helsa kept his courtyard in the seventeenth century, which is to say much as it did when the Hanseatic herring boats put in. The square is still the square. The horn is still blown from the tower at quarter past nine. It is a town that has been allowed, by a series of accidents and decisions, to remain itself.