On 27 July 1361 — the Tuesday after St James’s day — a Danish army of a little over 2,000 men under King Valdemar Atterdag met a roughly equal levy of Gotlandic farmers outside Visby’s eastern wall. Around 1,800 Gotlanders were killed. The town behind the wall did not fight on; it came to terms. The dead were buried where they fell, on ground belonging to Solberga convent, in at least five pits.
What makes this ground matter is that nobody stripped the bodies. It was high summer, the burials were hurried, and the dead went into the pits still wearing their mail and their coats of plates. Excavations run by the National Heritage Board between 1905 and 1928 lifted roughly 1,800 individuals out of them, and the armour and the injured bone they produced remain the most-cited physical evidence anywhere for what medieval weapons actually did to people. The finds are split between the 1361 room at Gotlands Museum, twenty minutes’ walk away on Strandgatan, and the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm.
The graves were not a modern discovery. In 1811, workmen digging for a powder magazine here turned up skulls with battle injuries; in 1905 a plantation being laid out hit skeletons and mail, and the archaeologists were called in. A limestone ring cross had stood on the site the whole time — the Gotlandic ringed form, with a crucified Christ, raised on one of the graves later in the 14th century and cut with the line Anno Domini MCCCLXI feria III post Jacobi ante portas Visby in manibus Danorum ceciderunt Gutenses, hic sepulti, orate pro eis: “In the year of Our Lord 1361, on the Tuesday after St James’s day, the Gotlanders fell before the gates of Visby into the hands of the Danes. They are buried here. Pray for them.” A cross carrying that inscription still stands on the site. Whether the stone you are looking at is the 14th-century original or a later replacement is not something we could settle against an official source — worth asking at Fornsalen.
The ground around it is Solberga, Gotland’s only nunnery: Cistercian, founded in 1246 at the islanders’ own request, given up in 1404 when the abbess and twelve nuns moved inside the wall. Excavated parts of the convent’s outbuildings are exposed; raised earth banks and stone footings mark the rest; the church is laid out in blocks on the grass with the real foundations still buried beneath. A ground-penetrating radar survey in spring 2025 went looking for its eastern edge.
Practically, this is an open patch of grass along Östra Hansegatan where Artillerigatan meets it, about 400 m east of Söderport, with a residential street down one side. Owned by the National Property Board, protected as a registered ancient monument, and always accessible. No gate, no ticket, no visitor centre.
