Roma Monastery

I found Roma Monastery by accident, on a bicycle detour inland from the main north-south road. I had been following a sign that said “Klostret” and expecting something small and managed, a ruin with an information board and a parking lot. What I found instead, in the middle of a flat agricultural landscape of sugar beet and barley, was a set of stone arches of considerable scale rising out of grass and wildflowers, with no fence, no entrance fee, no one present at all. I left my bicycle against a wall and walked into the nave through what was once the west door, now just an opening, and stood in the roofless interior and listened to the wind move through the Gothic arches above me.

The monastery was founded in 1164 by Cistercian monks from the German house of Nydala, making it one of the oldest in Scandinavia. The church was large — you can still read the scale of it from the surviving walls and the footprint of the columns — and the complex once included a chapter house, cloister, refectory, and dormitory, most of which now survive only as foundation stones half-hidden in the grass. The monks managed a substantial agricultural estate across the Gotland interior, and their work transformed the landscape; they drained the marshes, introduced new crops, and ran the island’s mills. They were expelled in 1525 during the Reformation, and the monastery was used as a storage facility, then a stable, then gradually stripped of its cut stone by locals who found it a convenient quarry over the following centuries. The arches survived because they were too complicated to take apart.

In summer, the ruins host an outdoor theater festival — Roma Teater — that uses the arches as a natural stage. I was there too early in the season for performances, but I saw the seating setup: wooden benches arranged in the grass facing the surviving east wall, and I imagined what it must look like at dusk with the stone lit from below and the Baltic sky darkening behind the arches. Outdoor theater works best when the architecture has already done the heavy lifting, and these walls have had nine hundred years to practice.

The village of Roma itself, half a kilometer away, is quiet and agricultural — a cooperative center, a café that opens on weekday mornings, a church. The monastery is the reason to come, and the reason to come is specifically the quality of the abandonment. Unlike Visby’s church ruins, which are carefully maintained within a UNESCO World Heritage context, Roma Kloster sits in a field and gets wet in the rain and has moss growing on everything and is better for it. I cycled away from it slowly, stopping once to look back at the arches through a gap in the hedge, and they looked like a natural feature of the landscape, which perhaps, after nine hundred years, they are.

When to go: May through September, when the grass inside the ruins is green and the sky above the arches rewards every upward glance. Roma Teater runs performances in July and August — check their schedule online if you want to combine culture with the ruins. The monastery is an easy bicycle day trip from Visby, about twenty flat kilometers inland through agricultural countryside.