Myresjö gamla kyrka

From ruin back to life

The church might well not exist today. As early as 1814 a bishop judged it too small and decrepit and wrote it off, and in 1879 the parish, joined with neighbouring Lannaskede, opened a brand-new church on the boundary between the two communities. The old building was simply left to decay. By the turn of the century the roof of the nave had collapsed, the fittings were hauled off, and saplings took root inside the deserted walls — a picture of Romantic ruin that still had a certain pathos.↗

Salvation came from a local antiquarian, Lieutenant Torsten Fogelberg, who in the 1920s took up the cause of the doomed ödekyrka ("deserted church"). With the National Heritage Board's backing, a thorough restoration ran from 1925 to 1927: the walls were repaired, a new roof was raised over the nave, the old south doorway was reopened, and the rescued medieval furnishings were brought back to their home. Crucially, because the roof over the choir and apse had stayed intact all through the years of ruin, the ancient wall paintings there had been shielded — and as the lime-wash of later centuries was stripped away, the forgotten medieval frescoes reappeared. Since then, further repairs in the 1950s, 1970s and 2000s have kept the church sound, and it once again holds services, the bell ringing from a red-painted belfry (klockstapel) raised in 1927.↗

Inside: a thousand years painted and carved

Enter through the south doorway — there is no porch or tower — and the contrast between the plain nave and the richly painted choir is part of the building's quiet drama. The nave is largely white and unadorned, with closed pews dating from the restoration and an organ on a gallery trimmed with 17th-century decoration. Beyond the broad triumphal arch, however, the walls come alive.

The frescoes on the choir walls, believed to date from the 12th–13th centuries, are among the oldest preserved Romanesque paintings in Sweden, painted in warm reds and browns. They include scenes such as Christ's entry into Jerusalem and the meeting of Jesus and Thomas, with a fragmentary Crucifixion on the southern side. On the arched wall that frames the apse, a man in helmet and armour with shield and spear stands facing a woman with hands raised in prayer; these are read as the worldly donor couple who paid for and founded the church — an unusually personal glimpse of the highland aristocracy of the Middle Ages.↗

The domed apse, where the original stone high altar still stands, is cloaked in a later 17th-century scheme centred on Christ enthroned in glory amid rings of clouds and angels. Around the room you find the church's oldest treasures side by side with its later additions: the 12th-century baptismal font, carved with a dragon, lions and fabulous beasts and attributed to the regional Njudung workshop; a 13th-century wooden triumphal crucifix hanging in the chancel arch; and a fine pulpit of 1679 inlaid in elaborate Renaissance marquetry, complete with sounding board. A carved wooden lion discovered during excavations in the 1970s hints at just how much craft lies hidden in these walls.↗

Runestones on the threshold

One of the most evocative details is set right into the wall of the south doorway: a runestone (catalogued as Sm 97) built into the portal masonry. Trimmed to fit the opening, its inscription is still legible enough to record that a son — or possibly a daughter — raised the stone in memory of a parent. Inside the church a second runestone (Sm 98) is kept, said to have once served as a threshold stone at a small side entrance. They tie the Christian stone church to the older Norse culture of the same families who built it, and place Myresjö firmly in a wider landscape of Viking-age grave fields and standing stones.↗

Setting and how to visit

The church sits centrally in the village of Myresjö, on Stationsvägen, about nine kilometres from Vetlanda in the open Småland highlands — an easy stop for anyone touring the forested interior between Jönköping, Vetlanda and Vrigstad. As a heritage site it is most often open to visitors, and guided tours of the church and its artwork can be arranged through the parish; there is even a mobile-audio guide you can access by phone on site, with information posted at the church itself. Because it remains a living parish church, services and weddings take place here, so a quiet moment of prayer is always a possibility.

For a richer picture of the district, pair Myresjö with the nearby Lannaskede gamla kyrka only a few kilometres away — another surviving towerless Njudung stone church with a similar columned Romanesque portal — and with the larger Lannaskede-Myresjö kyrka, the shared 19th-century parish church built in 1876 that this old one was replaced by. Together the three buildings tell the whole story of a Småland congregation across nine centuries.↗