Friday, August 23, 2013

Friday's Church: A Stave Church



While the number is dwindling, there are still quite a few stave churches in the higher reaches of the Nordic countries.  From an old pamphlet that I found in my travel drawer:
A stave church is a medieval wooden Christian church building. The name is derived from the buildings' structure of post and lintel construction which is a type of timber framing, where the load-bearing posts are called stafr in Old Norse and stav in Norwegian. Two related church building types are also named for their structural elements, the post church and palisade church, but are often also called stave churches.

Once common all over northwestern Europe, most of the surviving stave churches are in Norway. The only remaining medieval stave churches outside Norway are ones dating to approximately the year 1500 located at Hedared in Sweden and one Norwegian stave church that was relocated in 1842 to the outskirts of Krummhübel, Germany, now Karpacz in the Krkonoše mountains of Poland.