Burträsks kyrka

A wooden church is thought to have stood here from around 1580, soon after the parish was formally established in 1606. By the late 1600s this had become too small and was replaced by a larger cross-shaped timber church. That building too proved inadequate, and in the early nineteenth century a new church was raised just north of the old one, built between 1817 and 1823 with a tower added in 1829; the design, originally by Simeon Geting, was amended by the Royal authorities before construction. This third church was destroyed by fire on 27 December 1945.

The current church, designed by architect Bengt Romare and consecrated in 1949, is built of brick with a white-rendered exterior on a cross-shaped plan roughly 40 metres long. Its combined but offset tower rises to 50 metres, and the interior, with a ceiling height of up to 13 metres, is among the largest of any twentieth-century church in Norrland. The pointed-arch windows recall Gothic tradition, while the vaulted proportions echo medieval parish churches, scaled up considerably; the chancel has a star vault, the rest cross vaults, with the mix of styles reflecting national romantic and modernist influences of the period. The roof, originally wood-shingled, was reclad in slate during renovation in 1975.

Inside, exposed red brick walls contrast with white-plastered vault surfaces. The chancel is dominated by a large three-part fresco by the Finnish-Swedish artist Lennart Segerstråle, assisted by Mirjam Vainio, depicting Christ's agony in Gethsemane, the crucifixion and entombment, and the risen Christ, spread across three fields.

The church has a substantial organ installation, developed in stages from the 1950s and expanded with a chancel organ in 1989, the two instruments later linked so that their combined stops can be played from a single console — an unusually large arrangement for a church of this size.