Bankeryds kyrka

A medieval church once stood here, but it was destroyed during the Northern Seven Years' War in the 1560s. Its successor, a timber-built nave with a stone chancel and sacristy, served the parish for centuries; a seventeenth-century description recalled a modestly decorated wooden church with a small altarpiece, a pulpit and a bell tower housing two bells. As the congregation grew, this building eventually proved too small, and after a decision taken in 1855 a new stone church was finally built in 1865, designed in a neoclassical style by the architect Johan Fredrik Åbom. It was consecrated in August 1868.

The whitewashed, roughcast exterior is dominated by a west tower with rounded, Romanesque-inspired sound openings and pointed gothic gables, topped by an eight-sided open lantern and a spire crowned with a cross-orb. Two bells hang within, of uncertain age; the larger was renovated in 1716, while the smaller was recast twice in the eighteenth century. Inside, the barrel-vaulted hall church is lit by tall round-arched windows. The chancel is dominated by a 1954 painting by Torsten Nordberg depicting the Eight Beatitudes, and the church also holds a 1950s fresco by Folke Eriksson showing Mary Magdalene's encounter with the risen Christ.

Several older objects survived the rebuilding. An altar crucifix is dated to the fifteenth century, and a carved sandstone font dates from the late seventeenth century. Nearby stands an earlier altarpiece in the form of a cross with a crown of thorns and shroud. The pulpit originates in the seventeenth century but was remodelled in the nineteenth. A gilded eighteenth-century hourglass, complete with a silvered skull framed by gilded wings, is among the more curious survivals from the old church. A Madonna sculpture, donated in 1982, was made by the Bankeryd-born artist Knut Anderson, who is buried in the churchyard. Two memorial tablets commemorate local figures from the late seventeenth century.

The present mechanical organ was built in 1956 by Olof Hammarberg of Gothenburg, incorporating the façade and windchest of an earlier 1879 instrument by Erik Nordström of Eksjö.