Stave Church Programme

Hopperstad stave church in Sogn og Fjordane County. Photo: Jiri Havran, Riksantikvaren

In 2001, Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Norway initiated a project to restore all the stave churches in the country. This project is due to be completed in 2015 and will cost one hundred million kroner, spread out over this period.

Why is it important to take care of the stave churches?
The stave churches are Norway’s most important contribution to world architecture and the oldest preserved wooden buildings in the country. They are unique in a European context and represent our foremost contribution to international construction history.

The stave churches are not only valuable as buildings. They also form valuable elements in the cultural landscape, and contribute to illustrating where the major traffic arteries have been routed and how the landscape has previously been used. It is therefore vital that the areas immediately around the churches should not be deconstructed or changed.

What is the Stave Church Programme?
The poor condition of the stave churches and the challenges that are faced form the background to the Directorate for Cultural Heritage initiating this restoration project in 2001.

The aim of the Stave Church Programme is that, amongst other things, the project of restoring and preserving the churches should lead to more people coming into contact with them, and with the cultural historical values that they represent. The Directorate for Cultural Heritage therefore wishes to open up the building sites to the public, so that schools and museums, for example, can make use of the information about the churches and the work being carried out on and around them in their own work.

There is also a desire for the Stave Church Programme to create positive knock-on effects, in the form of greater local activity with regard to traditional means of using materials and resources; also that both the stave churches and their maintenance should contribute to developing the local economy.

In order to be able to carry out the Stave Church Programme, it is absolutely necessary to build further on the knowledge that has already built up in the course of the last few years in the field of traditional handicrafts and “new” knowledge concerning the use of different traditional materials.

Many of the stave churches are richly decorated and this ecclesiastical art will be protected and taken care of.

What is happening locally?
The stave churches in Numedal in Buskerud are the first on the list. There are four stave churches in this valley: Uvdal, Nore, Rollag and Flesberg. In Nore, a comprehensive project to restore the church started in August 2003. In Uvdal and Rollag, smaller-scale projects are in progress. In Rødven in Møre and Romsdal and Hegge in Oppland, preparations for this work have begun.

 

The stave churches are protected!

All the stave churches are automatically protected by the Cultural Heritage Act. All of them have had fire prevention systems installed, which are regularly inspected and maintained.

All the protection work carried out on the stave churches has been done using small-scale building and aesthetic procedures. The upgrading of the protection systems also requires specialist skills and is expensive.


Interior from Heddal stave church in Telemark county. Photo: Birger Lindstad, Directorate for Cultural heritage

There aren’t many left

During the thirteenth century, the Kingdom of Norway was at the height of its powers and had its own archbishopric, with its seat in Trondheim. At that time there were still just under a thousand stave churches, spread over most of the country.

In all, it is thought that the country had over two thousand churches. Today, there are 28 left. Most of these are to be found in the inner part of Østlandet and in Sogn. Stave churches are reckoned to be the most outstanding wooden buildings that have been created in our cultural complex, in terms of construction, choice of materials, décor and furnishings.

More about the stave churces at www.environment.no »