Urnes Stave Church
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- An iron candlestick on the altar, made in the 1100s, is shaped like a Viking ship with nine candle spikes and dragon-headed vanes at both ends.
- Tree-ring dating shows the oldest reused timbers were felled around 1070, while wood for the present church was cut in the winter of 1129–1130.
- Urnes and Bryggen in Bergen were the first two places in Norway to join the UNESCO World Heritage List, both inscribed in 1979.
- On the north portal, about a third of the way up the right side, one carved serpent is shown spitting a fleur-de-lis from its mouth.
- Above the chancel arch hangs a Romanesque Calvary group, Christ flanked by Mary and John, counted among the finest of its kind to survive.
- Its finest medieval sculpture, a Madonna carved between 1150 and 1200 whose Christ Child has been lost, is now kept in the Bergen Museum.
- Historians have traced parallels between the carved capitals and contemporary Islamic and Mediterranean art, evidence of the sea links of Norway's medieval elite.
- A wall painting of 1607 in the choir shows Christ and the twelve apostles, probably by the painter who decorated the ceiling of Lom church a year later.
- The ornament of the Bird Room in the Royal Palace in Oslo, designed by Johannes Flintoe, is in the Urnes style and probably based on Dahl's 1837 plates.
- The coat of arms of Luster municipality takes its motif from the distinctive carvings on the stave capitals inside the church.
Why it is worth it
Urnes Stave Church stands on a green ledge above the Lustrafjord, an arm of the Sognefjord, facing the village of Solvorn across the water. It is among the oldest of Norway's stave churches and is widely believed to be the oldest of all: the present building dates from around 1130, and excavation in 1956 revealed two earlier churches on the same spot. Parts of the second, built in the late eleventh century, were reused in the third, which is why the church carries carvings older than itself. It has belonged to the Society for the Preservation of Norwegian Ancient Monuments since 1881 and in 1979 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The glory of Urnes is the carved portal and wall planks on the north side, salvaged from the earlier church. Across them writhes a dense, elegant tangle of slender four-legged beasts and serpents biting one another, their bodies stretched into looping ribbons. The carving is so distinctive that it gave its name to the Urnes style, the last phase of Viking animal ornament. Some scholars read the struggle as a scene from the end of the pagan world, a serpent gnawing at the roots of the world tree — an old image carried into a Christian church.
Inside, the building follows the plan of a Romanesque stone basilica translated into timber: sixteen staves carry a raised central nave, and the cylindrical columns end in cubic capitals carved with human figures, animals, a centaur and interlaced foliage. Later centuries added a font of 1640, a canopy over the altar, a pulpit of the 1690s and an altarpiece of 1699, and the church is still used for occasional baptisms and weddings.
Getting there
A small car ferry crosses the fjord from Solvorn to Ornes several times a day in about 20 minutes; the church is roughly 1 km uphill from the Ornes landing. Buses run from Sogndal to Solvorn. The nearest airport is Sogndal Airport (SOG) at Haukåsen, with Widerøe flights.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Urnes Stave Church is a 12th-century stave church at Ornes, along the Lustrafjorden, in Luster Municipality in Vestland county, Norway.
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