Week 34 of the painting project „One Year – One Island“
Lighthouses have a certain fascination, or at least those that correspond to our image of a lighthouse: a tall, round tower with a steep spiral staircase inside the wall leading up to the dome. In our romantic imagination, the shining giant stands directly on a cliff lashed by gout and high waves. Here, the bearded lighthouse keeper lives, lonely as a hermit, in an almost windowless, round room in his lighthouse. Pretty much like the 2018 Keepers movie poster. At least, that’s how I imagined it before I moved to the island.
And some of it is true, for example, that it is quite lonely up here on Öland’s northern tip. But most lighthouse keepers had wives and children, and they lived together in a normal, square house next to the lighthouse. There are also square lighthouses and others that consist only of a metal frame. The „Långe Erik“ however, is round and built of Öland limestone. Compared to the „Långa Jan“ at the southern tip, it seems modest (an unfair comparison, by the way, since the „Långa Jan,“ at 41.60 meters, is Sweden’s tallest lighthouse). While the southern lighthouse has been burning since 1785, its little brother in the north was only built 60 years later, and on November 1, 1845, the lighthouse, in this case the oil lamp surrounded by mirrors, was lit for the first time. The oil lamp has since been replaced with new, fully automated technology, and the light still shines 13.8 nautical miles (25.5 kilometers) across the Baltic Sea, having since guided many ships crossing the Kalmarsund or rounding the northern tip of Öland. No one knows where the name „Erik“ came from, but it is suspected that it was meant to be a counterpart to „Långa Jan“ (who got his name from the medieval chapel of St. Johannes on the southern tip). Otherwise, there’s nothing unusual about this northern lighthouse. But still „Långe Erik“ attracts tourists in the summer: for 120 SEK, they can climb the 138 steps in a circle to the platform and gaze out over the Baltic Sea and Grankulla Bay from a height of 28 meters. The lighthouse keeper’s house has recently been converted into a waffle café, ice cream bars are available at the kiosk, and there’s even an automated canoe rental station.
Something else, however, seems to outshine all these attractions: the many stone towers at the foot of the lighthouse. Years ago, some visitor must have had the idea of building a tower out of some of the stones on the beach, and since then, it seems to have become a real tourist activity: hardly a visitor seems to resist the tower-building. There are now so many that those who don’t want to build their own towers have to at least take a few photos.
The stone towers have also spread to other places with lots of stones (and there are an enormous number of them on Öland), including in Trollskogen around the weathered wreck of the Swiks and at the old grinding mill on the coastal road north of Sandvik. The authorities have made a few timid attempts to stop these stone towers, as they supposedly – according to the explanation on the small signs – disrupt the fauna on the pebble beach, but to no avail. It is probably a similar phenomenon to love locks on bridge railings, monogram scratches in historic walls and stickers on traffic light posts: humans are descended from animals and display territorial behavior in which they want to leave their mark – even if it is only by stacking stones to say “I WAS HERE!”.
This is my painting of the week, where I captured those stone stacks during an evening after my day working in our café. Hope to see you soon here – I will show you Byxelkrok and at the same time I start heading south again.
