Ödeby kyrka

The church is thought to have begun as a private estate chapel serving the manor of Tuna, later known as Kägleholm. By around 1670 the estate, and with it the patronage of the church, had come under the control of the powerful Chancellor Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie. The earliest building had a square tower, a wider nave and a narrower chancel separated by a wall; during the late medieval period the chancel was widened and that dividing wall removed, though the exact location of the sacristy from this phase is uncertain.

The church's present appearance is largely credited to De la Gardie, who financed a substantial rebuilding in 1679–1680. The nave was lengthened, giving the small church its current proportions, and the interior was refashioned in a restrained Baroque style. Several paintings and fittings are said to have been brought from Läckö Castle, one of De la Gardie's grand residences. A new sacristy was added on the north side, and the tower received a tall spire originally intended for the town hall in Lidköping. The roof, first covered in wooden shingles, was later replaced with copper on the tower and sheet iron on the church roof during further eighteenth-century work.

Among the church's notable furnishings is a carved oak altarpiece from Flanders, made in Mechelen in the early sixteenth century. The pulpit, dated 1681, carries decorative sculpture attributed to craftsmen including Georg Baselaque and Fredrik Siptus. Other treasures include a hymn book from 1673, predating the Church of Sweden's official hymnals, seventeenth-century oil paintings, and fragments of a memorial cloth thought to originate from the workshop of the medieval painter Albertus Pictor in the 1470s, reportedly made for Katarina of Vadstena.

The church's organ history is of particular interest to specialists. An earlier seventeenth-century instrument, a gift from De la Gardie originally built for a royal chapel in Uppland, was eventually replaced in 1856 by a new mechanical organ built by Erik Adolf Setterquist of Hallsberg, with a case designed by the architect Carl-Gustaf Blom-Carlsson. Restored to something close to its original condition in 2005, it is regarded as one of the best-preserved examples of Setterquist's early work, built before the more Romantic influences that shaped his later instruments.

Several notable individuals are recorded as buried at Ödeby, among them members of local landed and cultural families, reflecting the church's long association with the surrounding estates.