Orkesta kyrka

The oldest part of the church is the eastern end of the nave and its apse-shaped chancel, built of grey stone with sandstone corner quoins towards the end of the 1100s. A sacristy and small porch were added in the 1400s, both fitted from the outset with brick cross-vaults. Around the same period the nave was extended westward, its unusually thick walls apparently intended to support a tower that was never completed. Brick vaulting replaced an earlier flat wooden ceiling in the nave during the 15th century, while the chancel retained its older stone barrel vault.

Around 1460 the vaults were decorated with limewash paintings, some of which were later covered over during an 18th-century refurbishment and only rediscovered and uncovered again in a 1910 restoration led by the architect Otilius Österberg. That same restoration enlarged the porch doorways to their present form and added a stained-glass depiction of Christ's head in the apse window. Earlier changes had already reshaped the building considerably: a round window was cut into the apse in 1750, the altar, pulpit and gallery were replaced during a refit of 1752–1753, and the windows were enlarged to their current size in 1817.

The most notable survival from the medieval church is a triumphal crucifix, dated to roughly 1325–1350, now mounted on the chancel's north wall after originally hanging in the triumphal arch between nave and chancel. The rococo-style pulpit-altar, along with the pews and gallery, dates from the 1753 refit; painted panels on the pulpit depict Christ in Gethsemane, Adam and Eve, and the Pentecost. A more recent addition is the polished limestone font, made in 1969 by the architect Karl Hampus Bergman, with a silver bowl by silversmith Göran Eriksson.

Outside, a wooden bell tower in the churchyard's southern section is thought to date from the 1600s; originally open-sided, it was clad in boards towards the end of the 18th century. It houses two bells, one given to the church in 1681 and later recast in 1741 together with a smaller bell, both by the founder Gerhard Meyer the Younger. A brick lychgate at the churchyard's southern entrance replaced an earlier wooden structure in the 1790s. Later restoration work in the 1970s renewed roofing on both the church and its outbuildings with corten steel, in place of earlier sheet metal and shingles.

A local tradition holds that Gustav Vasa was baptised nearby at Lindholmen manor, and a stone memorial tablet from 1896 in the church commemorates the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth — though this remains a tradition rather than a documented fact.