Sites & cities that bear the name of Lund

Lund

Today in : Sweden
First trace of activity : 990 C.E
Last trace of activity : today

Description : Lund is a city in the southern Swedish province of Scania, across the Öresund strait from Copenhagen. The town had 91,940 inhabitants out of a municipal total of 121,510 as of 2018. It is the seat of Lund Municipality, Skåne County. The Öresund Region, which includes Lund, is home to 4 million people. Archeologists date the foundation of Lund to around 990, when Scania was part of Denmark. From 1103 it was the seat of the Catholic Metropolitan Archdiocese of Lund, and the towering Lund Cathedral, built circa 1090–1145, still stands at the centre of the town. Denmark ceded the city to Sweden in the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658, and its status as part of Sweden was formalised in 1720. Lund University, established in 1666, is one of Scandinavia's oldest and largest institutions for education and research. The university and its buildings dominate much of the centre of the city, and have led to Lund becoming a regional centre for high tech industry. Lund is sometimes mentioned as the oldest town or city in present-day Sweden, although it has only been formally established as such for 300 years of its at least thousand-year history. It is old enough that its origins are unclear, but is presumed to have existed by the end of the Viking Age. Until the 1980s, the town was thought to have been founded around 1020 by either Sweyn I Forkbeard or his son Canute the Great of Denmark. The area was then part of the kingdom of Denmark. But, recent archaeological discoveries suggest that the first settlement dated to circa 990, possibly the relocation of settlers at Uppåkra. The Uppåkra settlement dates back to the first century B.C. and its remains are at the present site of the village of Uppåkra. King Sweyn I Forkbeard moved Lund to its present location, a distance of some five kilometres (3.1 miles). The new location of Lund, on a hill and across a ford, gave the new site considerable defensive advantages in comparison with Uppåkra, situated on the highest point of a large plain. The organisation of the Danish church begun under the rule of Canute the Great. Lund became the see of one of seven dioceses in 1048. In 1104 it became an archbishopric. Lund's ecclesiastical province comprised Scandinavia and even Garðar on Greenland. The diocese of nearby Dalby was absorbed in 1066. Lund Cathedral was similarly founded in or shortly after 1103. In 1152, the Norwegian archdiocese of Nidaros was founded as a separate province of the church, independent of Lund. In 1164 Sweden also acquired an archbishop of its own, although he was nominally subordinate to the archbishop of Lund. It is still, as the diocese of Lund, a diocese in the Church of Sweden.

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