Kastellet (The Citadel)

You are walking around inside a working fortress. Kastellet is shaped as a five-pointed star with a bastion at each corner, and it is one of the best preserved works of its kind in northern Europe. It is still a military area. It is also a public park. Those two things have existed side by side here for over three hundred years. It got its shape after the Swedes laid siege to Copenhagen from 1658 to 1660. The city held through a winter that should have broken it, and afterwards the king decided the northern flank would never lie open again. The gates date from 1663. The King's Gate, the one facing the city, carries garlands, pilasters and a bust of Frederik III. The windmill up on the King's Bastion is from 1847 and is the last of sixteen rampart mills that once ground grain around the whole city. It still works. But look closely at the church from 1703, and at the wall behind it. The prison stood there. And set into the wall between the prison and the church are small sound holes. They were made on purpose, so that prisoners could hear the service without being let into the church. They were given the words but not the room. There are few places where an entire era's view of punishment and salvation is built so plainly into a wall.