Urnes Stave Church
The small wooden church on the Lustrafjord is Norway’s oldest surviving stave church. The walls stand on upright planks, staves, and on the north wall are carved planks from an older church. Their winding animals have given their name to a whole style, the Urnes style.
In the Middle Ages stave churches were the most common type of church in Norway, and there may have been more than a thousand. Urnes Stave Church was built around 1130, as tree-ring dating of the timber has shown. An even older wooden church had stood on the site before, and parts of it were reused. Most famous are the portal and planks on the north wall, which probably come from the older 11th-century church. The church is built of pine heartwood.
A stave church stands on a frame of sills, horizontal timbers resting on a stone foundation. In the sills stand corner posts and vertical planks, staves, which form the walls. Urnes has a taller central space, carried by free-standing staves with carved capitals, and a lower surrounding space. The carvings on the north portal show elongated, winding animals biting one another in a dense and elegant pattern. That style is today called the Urnes style and is the last of the Viking Age animal styles.
The church has been altered and given new windows and furnishings over the centuries, but the structure is medieval. The Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments bought the church in 1881, and it has since been cared for as a monument. It became a World Heritage Site in 1979, one of the first sites in the Nordic countries. Of Norway’s many stave churches, about twenty-eight remain. Urnes shows how Christian church building and the imagery of the Viking Age met in timber architecture.