Qualla: Ekenäs Church

Ekenäs Church: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abc10, CC BY-SA 4.0. Count Gustaf Adolf Lewenhaupt never saw a stone of it laid straight. He gave the order in 1651 that Ekenäs should finally have a church of granite instead of timber, and five years later, in 1656, he died of wounds taken in the Thirty Years' War — the long European bloodletting that had pulled Swedish noblemen south for a generation. His instruction survived him. Twenty-nine years later his son Gustav Mauritz Lewenhaupt completed the building according to his father's will, and on the outer wall a memorial plate still shows the count alongside his wife, Christina Catharina de la Gardie. Ekenäs Church is the product of exactly this pattern: people who started things, and other people who had to finish them.

Read more: Ekenäs Church on Qualla

Image: Abc10 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ekenäs Church: A Will Carried Out in Granite

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tomisti, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ekenäs had been building toward this for generations. In 1589 Count Axel Leijonhufvud began a small wooden church in Ekenäs; his younger brother Moritz finished it in 1600. Through the 17th century the town's appetite for something more permanent grew, and the stone church begun ...

Read more: Ekenäs Church on Qualla

Image: Tomisti | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ekenäs Church: Four in the Morning, 14 June 1821

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neofelis Nebulosa, CC BY-SA 3.0. Fire took it at around four in the morning on 14 June 1821. It climbed into the wooden roof, and from there the interior was finished. Almost nothing came out of the building: the altarpiece and a handful of objects, carried into the summer dawn by whoever was awake and fast enou...

Read more: Ekenäs Church on Qualla

Image: Neofelis Nebulosa | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ekenäs Church: Bassi's Drawings, Granstedt's Hands

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaakko.kulta, CC BY-SA 4.0. The rebuilding fell to Charles Bassi, born in Turin in 1772 and by then the most consequential architect in the Grand Duchy of Finland. From 1810 he had run the government office responsible for church designs, a post he held until 1824, when Carl Ludvig Engel succeeded him. Bass...

Read more: Ekenäs Church on Qualla

Image: Jaakko.kulta | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ekenäs Church: The Astronomer Who Was Vicar Here

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abc10, CC BY-SA 4.0. One of the objects rescued from the fire was a Bible, and it belonged to the strangest man ever to hold this pulpit. Sigfridus Aronus Forsius, born around 1560, was a priest, astronomer, astrologer and naturalist who published the first almanacs printed in Sweden between 1608 and...

Read more: Ekenäs Church on Qualla

Image: Abc10 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ekenäs Church: Silver, Paint and Pipes

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abc10, CC BY-SA 4.0. The church's oldest fittings predate the granite that houses them. Communion vessels here date to 1613, from the wooden-church years. The altarpiece was made in Stockholm around 1660, but the paintings set into it are much younger: commissioned in Stockholm in 1797 and executed b...

Read more: Ekenäs Church on Qualla

Image: Abc10 | CC BY-SA 4.0