Östra Karups kyrka

The earliest church consisted only of a nave, chancel and apse, built in Romanesque style. As was customary, men and women entered by separate doors, from south and north respectively, a division that is said to have persisted in seating arrangements long afterwards. The original building had no tower, few and small windows, and a plain wooden ceiling rather than the vaulting seen today.

The tower was added in the twelfth or thirteenth century, though it collapsed in 1916 and was subsequently rebuilt, with the entrance moved to the tower's south side. Sources differ slightly on the exact original construction period of tower and vaulting, placing them broadly within the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. A porch built at the north entrance around the same era was demolished in 1826 when a new west doorway was created. In 1869 the church was enlarged into a cross-shaped plan with north, south and east extensions.

Inside, wall paintings dated to around 1470–1520 include a depiction of a medieval cargo ship and a sketched figure thought possibly to represent a bishop. Consecration crosses, painted at the time the church was dedicated according to Catholic custom, can still be traced on the walls. A notable carved tympanon stone, rediscovered in the foundation walls in 1898, shows a bishop with mitre and crook, flanked by a consecration cross and a sword, with a serpent-like figure winding along its lower edge; it is thought to have originally stood above the old south doorway.

The church's dedication to St Olof, the Norwegian king venerated as a saint after his death in 1030, reflects its position on a pilgrim route running through Skåne and Halland towards his shrine at Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim. A wooden sculpture of St Olof is recorded as having once stood in the church, described in a nineteenth-century parish account as a crowned figure holding a covered chalice and trampling a monstrous creature; the sculpture was lost in a fire in the vicarage annexe in the late 1800s.

Other furnishings include a granite font thought to be as old as the church itself, a triumphal crucifix from around the mid-thirteenth century hanging in the chancel arch, and an altarpiece painted by Pär Siegård in 1952. The current pulpit dates from the late nineteenth century, and the organ, built in 1842 by Johan Nikolaus Söderling of Gothenburg, was later rebuilt in the twentieth century.