Kvillinge kyrka

A stone church was probably first built here in the 1100s, comprising a nave and narrower chancel ending in an apse, with small high-set window openings and a hipped timber roof. A west tower may have been added at the same time or shortly afterwards. By the 1300s the church had gained two transepts, north and south, and the chancel was widened to match the nave.

Further changes followed in the 1400s, when the building was extended southwards to become two-aisled, a sacristy was added on the north side, and the church was given vaulting. The south porch appears to date from the early 1600s. In 1700 the whole church, inside and out, was limewashed by the mason Christian van Barel. Then in 1748 the medieval vaults were removed to make way for a new three-sided chancel, and the church was lengthened westward - alterations recorded by the eighteenth-century writer Carl Fredric Broocman, who described a cramped cross-shaped church transformed by rebuilding, with a pulpit newly given to the church in 1700 and an organ of six stops, but no altarpiece.

As the parish population grew, a more thorough rebuilding was undertaken from 1783, designed by the mason Törnberg and revised by the royal Board of Works. The late-medieval sacristy and small porch were demolished; the north transept was kept but extended and converted into a sacristy, with a new tower begun above it. The tower's design proved too ambitious for the builders and it collapsed, so a separate wooden bell shed was erected in the churchyard in 1788 instead. This rebuilding erased the last visible traces of the medieval church, leaving a Gustavian-style interior. The present tower was not built until 1927, to a design by the architect K. M. Westerberg; it now houses two bells, cast in 1693 and 1758.

The church underwent a heavy-handed restoration in the 1890s, and was refurbished again in the 1960s to a design by the architect Kurt von Schmalensee, who retained the 1890s character but lightened the interior colours; the church was reconsecrated in October 1968.

Among the furnishings, the altarpiece painted by Pehr Hörberg in 1788 depicts the Purification of the Virgin; its original painted frame was replaced with carved ornament in the 1890s. The brass font, richly decorated, was given in 1664 by Lieutenant Colonel Johan Adolf Stuart and his wife Anna of Lida manor, with a matching brass dish made in 1955 to a design by Märtha Gahn. A small group of medieval sculptures, thought to be the only surviving fragments of a medieval altar shrine, depicts the Coronation of the Virgin alongside Saints Erik and Olof, while a fifteenth-century relief shows Christ and the Virgin Mary - modest but tangible survivals of the church's earliest centuries.