Alsike kyrka

Brick was an expensive building material in the thirteenth century, so a parish church constructed of it, rather than stone or timber, was something of a rarity. The original medieval structure likely followed a typical plan of rectangular nave, eastern chancel, northern sacristy and southern porch, with an unplastered interior on which consecration crosses were painted directly onto prepared patches of wall. The sacristy, built of rough stone, may predate the brick church itself and could date back to an earlier timber building on the site. The west tower was added in the fifteenth century in rough stone, later topped with a brick upper section that was rebuilt again in 1799, when the bells were also moved into the tower from a freestanding belfry.

The church has suffered repeatedly from subsidence, since it was built on clay ground without adequate piling. Vaults had to be rebuilt several times, in 1631, 1667 and 1773, and transepts were added in 1860 partly to relieve pressure from the roof. Cracking continued to trouble the building into the twentieth century, and in 1947–48 the foundations were finally stabilised with 57 concrete piles. During restoration work in 1859–60 and again in 1910–11, much of the surviving interior character was shaped, including new vault plaster, an altered organ loft and reworked furnishings.

A striking discovery came in December 1947, when a large stone removed from beneath the church's foundation turned out to be part of a runestone carved by the well-known rune-carver Öpir. The pieces were reassembled and the stone now stands outside the church door, inscribed with a memorial to sons and brothers of a local family.

Fragments of medieval wall paintings survive on the nave walls and vault remnants, uncovered and recorded in 1897; they include depictions of apostles such as John and James the Elder. The visible paintings today, however, are largely a 1911 scheme by the painter Filip Månsson, with some repair work carried out in 1949. Two carved medieval saint figures, representing the Virgin Mary and Saint Sigfrid, were returned to the church in 2003 after being held at the Swedish History Museum, and are now displayed in the north transept.

Among the furnishings, the altar crucifix is thought to be a seventeenth-century North Italian work in ebony-inlaid blackened wood with a silver figure of Christ, bought in Venice and given to the church in 1911. Older textiles and a set of brass chandeliers, mostly from the seventeenth century, also survive, though the church's silver was stolen in 1852 and never recovered; replacement vessels were acquired later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The current organ, built in 1911 by Åkerman & Lund, retains its façade from an earlier 1860 instrument.