A stave church is a medieval wooden church with a post and beam construction related to timber framing. The wall frames are filled with vertical planks. The load-bearing posts (stafr in Old Norse, stav in Norwegian) have lent their name to the building technique. Related church types are post churches and churches with palisade walls.
All of the surviving stave churches except one are in Norway, but related church types were once common all over northwestern Europe. The only remaining medieval stave churches outside Norway are one dating to approximately the year 1500 located at Hedared in Sweden and one Norwegian stave church that was relocated in 1842 to the outskirts of Krummhübel, Germany, now Karpacz in the Krkonoše mountains of Poland. One other church, the Anglo-Saxon Greensted Church in England, has many similarities but is not universally regarded as a stave church.
Read more about Stave Church: Construction, History, Architecture and Decoration, Dating of Churches, Later Stave Churches and Replicas
Famous quotes containing the words stave and/or church:
“Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The church is a sort of hospital for men’s souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailor’s Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)