Sweden's Most Famous Churches – Architecture from the Middle Ages to the 1960s

Sweden's most famous churches are the great medieval cathedrals in Lund and Uppsala, Visby Cathedral and Vadstena Abbey Church, Kalmar Cathedral from the Age of Greatness, and the brick churches of the 20th century: Engelbrekt Church and Högalid Church in Stockholm, and Sigurd Lewerentz's St Mark's Church and St Peter's Church in Klippan. Alongside them come the small parish churches, such as Dalby and Husaby, and the chapels at the Woodland Cemetery. Together they show almost a thousand years of Swedish architecture, in the order in which they were built.

Facts

The first stone churches

Dalby Church outside Lund was built around 1060, when Dalby was for a short time a bishop's seat in what was then Denmark. It is probably the oldest surviving stone church in Scandinavia. Beneath the chancel lies a crypt with groin vaults on short, sturdy columns. Husaby Church in Västergötland has a broad west tower from the 12th century with three spires, one of the oldest in the country. According to tradition, Olof Skötkonung was baptised at the spring nearby.

Lund Cathedral is Sweden's most important Romanesque building. When Lund became the archiepiscopal see for the whole of the North in 1103, construction began, in sandstone on models from the Rhineland and Lombardy, and the high altar was consecrated in 1145. Look for the apse in the east with the dwarf gallery beneath the roof and the crypt, where, according to legend, the giant Finn stands petrified beside a column. The west façade with its towers, by contrast, is Helgo Zettervall's 19th-century interpretation.

Visby Cathedral, St Mary's, was built by the German merchants of Visby and consecrated in 1225. It is the only one of the town's medieval churches still in use, and the black Baroque caps of the towers, dating from after a fire in 1744, have become the town's hallmark. Gotland has over ninety medieval churches, and Sweden as a whole about a thousand.

The Gothic: cathedral and abbey church

Uppsala Cathedral is the largest church in the Nordic countries and the Swedish building that comes closest to the French cathedrals. Construction began in the 1270s, and in 1287 the French master builder Étienne de Bonneuil was hired to direct the work. The plan follows French models, but the material was brick. The church was consecrated in 1435. The tall spires date from Zettervall's restoration in the 1880s. Look for Gustav Vasa's burial chapel and the buttresses on the outside.

Vadstena Abbey Church was built in 1369–1430 for the convent of St Bridget, following her own instructions: plain, without splendour, with three aisles of equal height. The grey and bluish limestone gave it the name the Blue Church. The high altar stands, unusually, in the west, and here is the shrine with Bridget's relics.

The works of art in them are often as famous as the buildings. In Storkyrkan (Stockholm Cathedral) stands Bernt Notke's Saint George and the Dragon, and in Täby Church Albertus Pictor painted Death Playing Chess around 1480. Many parish churches received brick vaults and the lime paintings that cover them in the 15th century.

Churches of the Age of Greatness

When Sweden became a great power, its churches were to show that the country belonged to Europe. Katarina Church on Södermalm in Stockholm, designed by Jean de la Vallée and begun in the 1650s, has a centralised plan with a large dome over the crossing. It burned down in 1990 and was reconsecrated in 1995 after a careful reconstruction.

Kalmar Cathedral was designed by Nicodemus Tessin the Elder on Roman Baroque models, after the town had been moved to Kvarnholmen. It was built in 1660–1703 of limestone from Öland, with four corner towers and façades resembling temple fronts. A large dome was planned over the crossing but was never built. The church is one of the few entirely Baroque church buildings in Sweden.

Brick churches of the 20th century

Around 1910 architects sought a distinctively Swedish expression in brick and granite. Engelbrekt Church in Lärkstaden, designed by Lars Israel Wahlman and consecrated in 1914, rises on a rocky outcrop as if growing out of the bedrock. Inside it has one of the tallest church vaults in the Nordic countries, carried by vast, almost pointed arches. Ivar Tengbom's Högalid Church on Södermalm, consecrated in 1923, has two tall, slender towers that can be seen across the whole district.

At the Woodland Cemetery in Enskede, Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz built chapels in the pine forest over several decades: Asplund's little Woodland Chapel of 1920 with a steep black shingle roof and a white dome inside, Lewerentz's Chapel of the Resurrection, and finally Asplund's crematorium with three chapels and an open colonnade. The Woodland Cemetery became a World Heritage Site in 1994.

Lewerentz returned to churches as an old man. St Mark's Church in Björkhagen, 1956–1960, is built entirely of dark brick, and no brick has been cut: the wide joints take up all the differences. The roof consists of low brick vaults between steel beams. In St Peter's Church in Klippan, 1962–1966, he went even further: in the middle of the dark space stands a single steel column carrying the roof, the windows are fixed on the outside of the wall without frames, and the font is a large mussel shell above a crack in the floor. Both are counted among the finest churches of the 20th century.

How to read a church

Most Swedish churches have grown in stages. A medieval parish church often has a nave, a narrower chancel, a west tower and a porch, and much was added later: vaults, larger windows, a sacristy, a tower cap from the 18th century. Small round-arched windows and thick walls point to the 12th and 13th centuries, pointed arches to the later Middle Ages. The drawings below show a parish church and a large Romanesque basilica with the names of the parts.

All the churches are on the map below. The parts are explained in the guide to the parts of a church, medieval churches in Swedish history under the Middle Ages, and the difference between Romanesque and Gothic in the guide to Romanesque and Gothic style.

What to look for

Exercise

Which Swedish church is regarded as the oldest surviving stone church in Scandinavia?