Stockholm (AFP)

From plague to cholera. To relaunch its business at half mast since the start of the epidemic of new coronavirus, a Swedish tourist guide offers to lead visitors on the traces of the previous pandemics which struck Stockholm.

It is under a summer sun that Mike Anderson leads a small group passionate about history through the streets of Gamla Stan, the historic heart of the capital.

In the shade of the orange and yellow buildings that line the streets of the old town, stops will follow one after another in May to explain how the capital has been marked by past pandemics.

"It's quite interesting when we see what's going on today, we relate that to history and we see that people have already been there," explains the guide to AFP. .

Dressed in a long rigid cotton shirt over his clothes - a long beak mask on his face - Mike Anderson leads the group through the cobbled streets of the center, on the occasion of this first "march against the plague ".

For the occasion, several of the participants in this "walk" played the game. Dressed in dark clothes, one of them even made a replica of a mask worn by plague doctors in the Middle Ages.

For a little over an hour, everyone religiously listened to Mike Anderson who led them in the footsteps of past diseases, such as the bubonic plague which ravaged the country in the 1350s.

Later in the afternoon, the group will stop at a shady cemetery in the city to hear new stories about the plague epidemic that ravaged Sweden and the Baltic region in the 1710s followed by a cholera epidemic in the middle of the 19th century.

If some in the group do not know what parallel to make between these epidemics of another time and the coronavirus, all seem to be satisfied by this atypical lesson of history.

To illustrate his story, the guide uses a series of accessories, sometimes giving his person running and leaping to surprise the group through the streets of the old town, usually very busy, but now empty of its tourists .

Visitors to absent subscribers and locals who preferred to avoid crowds largely cut Mike Anderson's business.

If Sweden is one of the rare countries in Europe not to have imposed confinement, gatherings of more than 50 people have been prohibited since the end of March.

The Nordic kingdom had 4,854 deaths linked to Covid-19 on Friday.

It was when the number of reservations for his usual "ghost walks" started to decrease that Mike Anderson came up with the idea of ​​these "plague marches", he said, "a kind of survival instinct".

He intends to offer this visit more regularly and hopes that it will help the Swedes to cope with the current virus.

© 2020 AFP