Swedish Army Museum

Here is a fact that surprises almost everyone. Between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred, Sweden was one of the most aggressively militaristic nations on the planet. Three hundred years of nearly continuous warfare. Swedish armies fought across Europe, from Poland to Germany to Russia. They were feared. The Swedish Empire at its peak controlled Finland, the Baltic states, and chunks of northern Germany. And then they just stopped. Sweden has not fought in any war, excluding peacekeeping missions, since the Napoleonic era in the early eighteen hundreds. That is over two hundred years of unbroken peace. No other major European power comes close to that record. This museum, housed in a seventeenth-century arsenal originally built in the sixteen thirties, tells the story of one of history's most dramatic personality changes. The building itself has been used for military purposes since the mid sixteen hundreds, with the artillery's main depot located here for nearly three hundred years. Inside, the exhibits cover everything from the Vikings through the Swedish Empire's rise and fall to the Cold War. You can see King Gustav the Second Adolf's Thirty Years War military attire. And then, in a room dedicated to the Cold War, you will find something genuinely unsettling: gas mask suits designed for toddlers, from the nineteen seventies. Tiny rubber suits with face covers, made for children who could barely walk, because Sweden took the threat of nuclear attack seriously enough to prepare even its smallest citizens. Named best museum in Stockholm in two thousand and five, this place earns it. It is the museum of a country that went from being Europe's most dangerous military power to its most peaceful, and the exhibits never flinch from either chapter.