What to notice inside

In keeping with most Faroese churches, the interior is plain and quiet, and the great medieval carvings that once adorned it have long since been removed to museums. What remains inside is worth the look: the altarpiece, by the country's celebrated painter Sámal Joensen-Mikines, shows Christ walking on the sea rendered as a Faroese fishing boat, and there is a stained-glass piece at the entrance by the artist Tróndur Patursson. A copy of a bishop's crozier is on display, a nod to the grave found beneath the choir.↗↗↗

Look for a small sealed hole in the north wall. Until 1740 people afflicted with leprosy were kept outside the building and could follow the service through this opening, so they were not cut off entirely from worship — a strikingly human detail in an otherwise austere space.↗↗

The treasures that came from this church

Some of the most prized objects in Faroese cultural history originally belonged to Ólavskirkjan. When the church was restored in the 1870s, its carved medieval pew-ends — the Kirkjubøstólarnir, depicting the Apostles and other biblical figures — were taken out for safekeeping and ended up in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. They were returned to the Faroes and went on view at the National Museum of the Faroe Islands in Hoyvík, near Tórshavn, in 2002, where they are now among the museum's greatest treasures, alongside a 13th-century wooden statue of the Virgin and Child that once stood here. The church has also lent its motifs to widely-collected Faroese postage stamps.↗↗↗

A runestone from the Viking Age, the Kirkjubøur stone, was found in the church in 1832 and is likewise now in the National Museum of the Faroe Islands — evidence, with the older foundations beneath the floor, that this shoreline was holy ground well before the Christian hall rose on it.↗↗

The setting: Kirkjubøur's cluster of monuments

The church is best visited as part of Kirkjubøur as a whole, the most important historical village in the Faroe Islands and home to no other place in the country with so many imposing medieval monuments packed together. A short walk away stand the roofless, monumental walls of the Magnus Cathedral, a Gothic project begun around 1300 and probably never completed, and the old farmhouse Kirkjubøargarður, built on the ruins of the bishop's residence and reputedly the oldest continuously inhabited wooden house in the world. Together the three sites — church, cathedral and farmstead — let you walk straight into the medieval episcopal centre of the archipelago.↗↗↗

The setting is dramatic and intimate at once. The hamlet, of only some 75 people, lies on a narrow coast shelf beneath high cliffs on the south-west of Streymoy, looking out across the sea-cut to the islands of Hestur and Koltur and, beyond, to Sandoy. The little islet of Kirkjubøhólmur just offshore, with its eider-duck colony, is all that remains of a broader strip of land lost to the sea in a great storm.↗↗

Getting there and around

Kirkjubøur sits at the southern tip of Streymoy, a manageable half-day trip from the capital Tórshavn. The main sights sit beside one another at the eastern end of the village and can be seen at a relaxed pace in roughly an hour. The village is reachable on the free Tórshavn city bus (a weekday line and a Saturday line serve it; schedules and Sunday service change, so check the current timetable before planning a visit), and active travellers also reach it on a gentle roughly two-hour hike along the hill path from the capital.↗↗