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Wasa Museum Stockholm THE WASA: The eeriest and most thrilIing visit in Stockholm is to the Wasa Museum ("Wasavarvet"), on the Djurgarden, which houses the warship "Wasa," resurrected from the bottom of Stockholm's harbor in 1961, af ter it had lain there for over 300 years! lt has now rightfully become the most-visited tourist attraction in all of Scandinavia. The history of the Wasa is a fascinating one. For years, ocean archaeologists had hoped to recover one of the famous wooden warships of history, whose locations, on the ocean's floor, are generally well-known. One of them-Anders Franzen, of Stockholm-surmised that such ships would stilI exist only in areas where the salt content of the water was insufficient to permit wood-devouring sea worms to exit. Subsequently, he learned that the harbor of Stockholm was one such place, and af ter searching through ancient naval archives, he discovered that a Swedish warship-the Wasa-had sunk in the Stockholm harbor, in 1628, just as it was leaving port on its maiden cruise. Franzen proceeded to spend many summers, crisscrossing the harbor of Stockholm in a one-man motorbaat, dropping lines to dredge up objects from the deep. In 1958, he pulled up a wedge of centuries-old wood, and divers soon confirmed that he had found the Wasa, buried almost to the top of its hull in the muds below, and perfectly preserved! It took three years to raise the ship, until, on a thrilling day in April of 1961, with an enormous crowd headed by the King of Sweden in attendance, the Wasa broke surface. Fittingly, the first objects to appear were the sculpted figures of two Swedish sailors. Because the Wasa would crumble if it were ever to dry out, it has been placed in a specially-constructed museum, whose humidity is kept at nearly 95% by jets of water vapor that fill the entire building with a thin white fog, which only highlights the ghostly nature of the Wasa. To see this, take any streetcar that goes to Djurgarden, and ask the conductor to stop near the Wasa museum. Don't miss it!