Køge Museum

Although Køge Museum is housed in a listed building dating to the 1600s, the museum’s Viking archaeologist bids you welcome in a Viking Age home. Here you’ll see rare things like five pillars from a house that only survived because they were reused in a bridge over nearby Tryggevælde River. Objects from excavations of a chieftain’s estate at the Toftegård settlement, located about 10 km south of Køge at Stevns, are exhibited in a posthole arrangement – the excavation of postholes is one of our main sources of knowledge about life in ancient times. Here you’ll see mysterious gold figurines, which either had some religious and symbolic meaning now unclear to us, or were just a gift for visitors. An arrowhead, perhaps deliberately left in a posthole when the house was built as an amulet to protect the house and its occupants against harm. Dirt and rubbish swept up over hundreds of years contain small pieces of glass, beads, pottery and chewed bones from a hearty meal – much the same as we might find today when cleaning up. Overall, the finds give a fascinating insight into how people lived in the Viking Age. The Museum reopened in the summer of 2015 with a completely new exibition format, where much of the presentation is done via iPads.