Körsbärsdalen

2016-05-23

Updated: 2016-06-09

In Kista, down by the tiny stream Igelbäcken, twelve cherry trees stand in a semicircle around a memorial stone. These symbolize the twelve children from the nearby Kvarnbacka school who died in a bus crash in Norway in 1988. Hiro Kanakura, who was the driving force behind the memorial, describes how the creation of this memorial happened in a comment [a] on KistaChic (in Swedish). I would also recommend reading the last comment Hiro wrote [b].

The name of the place is Körsbärsdalen, The Cherry Valley, a name taken from the book The Brothers Lionheart, whose story is about children dying and finding a gentler, kinder world in the afterlife.

Due to the unusually cold spring, the cherry blossoms didn't appear until late April, and when they did they came so slowly that by the time the last buds had blossomed, the first flowers were already falling.