Qualla: Sauvo Church https://qualla.com/sauvo-church en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:39:16 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/d/8/p/sauvo-church-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Sauvo Church https://qualla.com/sauvo-church Sauvo Church: Introduction https://qualla.com/sauvo-church/ Photo credit Hotarju, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around 1650, somebody in Sauvo climbed a scaffold with a bucket of lime and painted out the apostles. The images on the brick vaults had been there since the 1470s, and to the hard Lutheran orthodoxy of the seventeenth century they smelled of Rome and its cult of saints. Under they went. They stayed under for roughly 250 years, emerging only in the early 1900s and not fully recovered until a conservation campaign finished in 1971. What you see when you tip your head back in Sauvo now is a medieval ceiling that survived by being hidden.

Read more: Sauvo Church on Qualla

Image: Hotarju | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/d/8/p/sauvo-church-wp/ud8p-sauvo-church-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Sauvo Church: Building in Stages https://qualla.com/sauvo-church/ Photo credit Lojo77, CC BY-SA 3.0. There has been a church here far longer than there has been this church. The first written mention comes from the registers of Turku Cathedral in 1346, and wooden churches stood on the site before that - the earliest perhaps at the start of the thirteenth century. Planning and fu...

Read more: Sauvo Church on Qualla

Image: Lojo77 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/d/8/p/sauvo-church-wp/ud8p-sauvo-church-building-in-stages.mp3 0:06 2 full Sauvo Church: The Paintings and the Whitewash https://qualla.com/sauvo-church/ Photo credit Tuulia.maria, CC BY-SA 4.0. The lime paintings of the 1470s run to plant ornament and to figures: apostles, prophets, and one very worldly donor. Lars Skalm, a nobleman who served as mayor of Turku in the early 1500s, gave money toward the church and was rewarded with a portrait of himself on the wall of it...

Read more: Sauvo Church on Qualla

Image: Tuulia.maria | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/d/8/p/sauvo-church-wp/ud8p-sauvo-church-the-paintings-and-the-whitewash.mp3 0:06 3 full Sauvo Church: Objects With Longer Memories Than the Walls https://qualla.com/sauvo-church/ Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Ypsilonatshared at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. Some of what stands inside is older than the building. The heavy baptismal font was cut from Gotland limestone in the 1200s, shipped in, and carried over from the wooden church it originally served. The altar itself is topped by a gravestone dated 1391. The triumphal crucifix han...

Read more: Sauvo Church on Qualla

Image: User: (WT-shared) Ypsilonatshared at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/d/8/p/sauvo-church-wp/ud8p-sauvo-church-objects-with-longer-memories-than-the-walls.mp3 0:06 4 full Sauvo Church: Who Sat Where, and Who Stayed Awake https://qualla.com/sauvo-church/ Photo credit Jopparn, CC BY-SA 4.0. Parish records make this church feel inhabited. In the 1600s services began at eight in summer and nine the rest of the year and ran until midday. On feast days there were two, one in Finnish and one in Swedish - and for a while the parish simply used both its churches at once, w...

Read more: Sauvo Church on Qualla

Image: Jopparn | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/d/8/p/sauvo-church-wp/ud8p-sauvo-church-who-sat-where-and-who-stayed-awake.mp3 0:06 5 full Sauvo Church: The Graves Outside https://qualla.com/sauvo-church/ Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. In the churchyard is Sauvo's military cemetery, where the parish's dead from Finland's twentieth-century wars were brought home and buried among the neighbours who had known them since childhood - a small municipality's losses, laid out in rows you can walk in a minute. The memor...

Read more: Sauvo Church on Qualla

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/d/8/p/sauvo-church-wp/ud8p-sauvo-church-the-graves-outside.mp3 0:06 6 full