Nyköping: the banquet that ended in tragedy

On the beautiful Baltic coast in eastern Sweden, Nyköping holds the ancient castle where one of the most celebrated and cruel betrayals in Swedish history took place.

The downtown, site of the celebrated medieval banquet that ended in tragedy, is comfortably walkable in a few hours.

The Nyköpingshus Castle, an imposing medieval fortress on the river of the same name, preserves the ruins of the tower where the famous 'Banquet of Nyköping' of 1317 took place.

A few minutes away, Nyköping's historic centre enlivens with picturesque coloured houses along the river, entirely rebuilt after a devastating seventeenth-century fire.

Continuing towards the coast, you reach the wide archipelago of Nyköping, with numerous uninhabited islands much popular among summer navigators.

Towards evening, local restaurants serve sea fish according to Sweden's coastal culinary tradition.

The tragic Banquet of Nyköping in 1317, when King Birger imprisoned and slowly starved his own two brothers in a castle tower, remains one of medieval Sweden's most dramatic episodes.

Nyköpingshus, one of Sweden's few medieval castles surviving nearly intact, still preserves the tower where this notorious dynastic betrayal occurred.