2018

It was a short season where I was not involved – back to work again. Just in time for the market I was back up to speed. With a developed concept in cooperation with Medborgarskolan we would continue working with skilled craftsmen from near and far: iron-working, coin minting, leather working, tanning, textile working, cooking.

Old men like Karl-Fredrik were back during the summer, manning the customs shed, armed with knowledge about payment, coins, weights and of course law and order.

The Lawman's house was as usual manned by Olof doing coin minting and metal casting. Manal was doing with textile working, along with Flor during the season with her broad knowledge of everything from food, cultivation, and textile working. A valuable addition to the educational activities.

Sadly our economist Gertrud left us and her earthly life by midsummer, and our new Therese had to tackle the economy in earnest, which she managed very well. During this year Jhonny was the man who developed in a fantastic way, taking care of all the children, games and activities in our new playground and activity area.

Ung i sommar (summer working youth) became a valuable addition to the recurring daily activities and theatrical situations in our historic environments. Volunteers poured in from all over the world and with out new crafting house and volunteer house we have created opportunities to accommodate them in a good way.

This season the Vellinge municipality had rented all our holiday cottages to accommodate newly arrived refugees. The need was great so were happy to help, and had the old hostel, SVEG house and white house renovated and rebuilt our old administration office into apartments. In total we now had 26 cottages and apartments at our disposal.

Our environments were now roughly 20 years and and started showing signs of needing renovation. During this season we have gone over them all.

The Viking market was a success as usual and we now also had the Family week, Children's week and Harvest feast which were successes locally and increased our visitor numbers substantially.

In the middle of all this I turned 70 years old.

This was also a successful year in the sign of the Vikings. The Destination Viking Association project Follow the Vikings lead to many exciting journeys retracing the steps of the Vikings, but a tragedy also struck. My good friend the the chairman of DVA, Jimmy Moncrieff from Shetland, suddenly passed away which also meant that I as the vice chair had to take over leadership of the Destination Viking Association.

The Viking concept became increasingly popular and we were figuratively drowned by various cinematic projects who wanted to visit Foteviken to use our fantastic historic environments for the dramatic Viking scenes they wanted to produce.

This year I was also given plenty of opportunities to travel. To South Africa with experimental archaeology in collaboration with EXARC. To India to study old crafts. To the US to follow up last year's museum visits at the largest living history museums, but also to study more traditional museums in New York and Washington. The year was ended with an exciting trip to Asia and New Zealand involving maritime studies of how the Polynesians sailed and spread with their simple boats in the region.