The Dutch-Renaissance Rosenborg Slot epitomizes Copenhagen’s simultaneously accessible and forbidding edifices. Built in 1606 as a summer palace by King Christian IV, its has been open to the public as a museum of royal history since 1833. Bedecked with the requisite towers, spires, and moat to serve as a fairy-tale castle, it sits on the western edge of gardens originally designed to grow its vegetables and flowers that today form Konigens Have (the Royal Gardens), Copenhagen’s most central and pleasant public park. I don’t say this lightly, since Kongens Have face the city’s botanical gardens and are catercorner to Østre Anlæg, which encompasses the Hirschsprung Collection and Royal Museum of Fine Arts.
Rosenborg Slot is a fitting tribute to Christian IV, who is known as "the Great Builder", as he also ordered the construction of the landmark Rundetarn (Round Tower), Børsen (Stock Exchange), and Kastellet (Europe’s oldest working fort). Some of the exhibitions of royal memorabilia on the ground floor cover his reign and are displayed in suitably dark oak rooms which (inadvertently) hint at the increasingly absolute nature of his rule and that of his successors. Frederick III, who dissolved the royal council and imposed absolute monarchy in 1660, is represented by bric-a-brac, including a chair equipped with tentacles that grabbed anyone who presumed to sit in it, who would be subsequently doused with water and released to the sound of a trumpet, in case anyone had missed the humiliation! The grandiloquent chair from which his successor, Christian V, bestowed the Order of the Elephant, which has elephant trunks as legs, seems tame by comparison!
The monotony of the turgid collection upstairs is broken only by the mirror cabinet, a room whose walls, floor, and ceiling are completely covered in mirrors to allow the king to peer up the skirt of whoever he chose to bed directly next door, leaving nothing (or perhaps everything) to his imagination. Being aware of this fact, I found it rather humorous that my entry into the room was delayed by the presence there of a Danish school group who were receiving a guided (and I hope somewhat bowdlerized!) tour. The top floor is the most interesting of the lot, not for any particular piece but rather its impressive collection of 18th-century silver furniture and two-thousand piece collection of exquisite "Flora Danica" pottery, each piece of which is handpainted with a different design.
The true highlight of the entire collection, and the reason for paying the admission fee (the Copenhagen Card confers only a meager discount) is the Green Cabinet, located in the castle’s basement and entered separately from the outdoors, although on the same ticket. The suitably sumptuous royal regalia and jewelry are directly inside, but it’s the Treasury, tucked behind appropriately ominous steel doors, that literally contains the crown jewels, as well as the (allegedly) millennium-old silver Oldenburg horn and a beautiful array of gold objects. It’s absolutism at its most over-the-top, and also most exquisite.