Østerlars Church

Interesting facts

The conical roof is covered with roughly 25,000 oak shingles.

The outer wall is about 2.15 metres thick, built as two faces of granite with gravel and earth packed between them.

The stairs inside the walls are so narrow that only one person can pass at a time, which made the upper floors easy to defend.

In times of danger the second floor sheltered the local population, and in peacetime it served farmers as a storeroom.

The church owns three runestones: one reused as the lintel of the north door, one from about 1100 in the porch and one from about 1070 outside.

The free-standing bell tower in the churchyard began life as the fortified entrance and gate tower.

The church is first recorded in a document of 1332, and the prefix Øster, meaning east, was added around 1600 to tell it apart from Nylars.

The Last Judgement on the central pillar is considered the most crowded Danish depiction of the scene, with the damned driven towards a huge dragon.

A baptismal chapel was fitted inside the hollow central pillar in 1955, with a Romanesque granite font brought from the parish of Rø.

An amateur historian's claim that Knights Templar treasure lies beneath the floor has been firmly rejected by university historians.

Why it is worth it

Østerlars Church looks less like a village church than a small castle: a thick round drum of fieldstone braced by heavy sloping buttresses and capped by a steep conical roof, standing in the farmland of northern Bornholm. It is the largest, and possibly the oldest, of the island's four round churches — the others are at Nyker, Nylars and Olsker — and was built around 1160; coins dated 1157 have been found in its floor. It is dedicated to St Lawrence, Lars in Danish, which gives the village its name.

The plan is unusual even among round churches. An apse and an oval chancel open off a large round nave, and the nave is built around a massive hollow central column about six metres across, with a small chamber inside known as "the oven". The building rises through three storeys, and there is evidence that it was fortified: the uppermost level served as an open shooting gallery, a reminder that on a Baltic island exposed to raids, the parish church also had to be the place of last refuge. The buttresses that give the church its fortress-like silhouette were added in the 16th century to hold up the outer wall, and the conical roof dates from a 17th-century replacement.

Inside, the central column is covered with wall paintings from about 1350 telling the story of Christ from the Annunciation through the Passion and ending with the Last Judgement. They were hidden under limewash after the Reformation and uncovered in 1882, then restored in 1889, 1960 and 2005. The cycle of scenes wrapped around the pillar gives the interior a very different mood from the rugged exterior.

Getting there

The church stands just north of the village of Østerlars, about 5 km south of Gudhjem on Bornholm, Denmark. Bornholm Airport (RNN) is about 18 km away in a straight line. Ferries reach Rønne, the island's main town, from Ystad in Sweden and from Sassnitz on Rügen in Germany; local buses from Rønne and Gudhjem stop in Østerlars, and a cycle path of about 5 km leads to the church from Gudhjem.

Østerlars Church

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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