Utö kyrka

The church owes much to Utö's iron mines, which had been worked since the early medieval period and reached their industrial peak in the nineteenth century. The Utö mining company funded a large part of the building costs, and stone for the walls was quarried from the mines themselves. Construction began in 1849 to designs by Johan Fredrik Åbom, a noted architect of the period, and the church was consecrated in November 1850.

The building is a rectangular hall church with the chancel to the east and a narrower sacristy behind it. A tower with a distinctive lantern rises at the west end, and the roofs, including the tower's many-sided lantern and the sacristy's sloping roof, are clad in copper. The neoclassical style is visible in details such as the slender decorative cornices. Walls are partly of timber and partly of mine stone, an unusual combination that reflects the church's origins.

Inside, the pews are enclosed in the older Swedish style, and the organ stands on a west gallery. The interior looked rather different when first built: a visible cast-iron roof truss was later concealed behind a wooden barrel vault during a 1946 restoration, and one of a pair of symmetrical doors flanking the shallow altar recess was blocked up at the same time. A porch and adjoining rooms were also added to the west end in the twentieth century.

Before this church was built, an earlier wooden chapel from 1700 stood on the southern part of the island; only a disused graveyard now marks its site. The church holds a genealogical table dating from the early seventeenth century, a survival that predates the present building itself. In the churchyard lies the grave of the author Erik Zetterström, known by his pen name Kar de Mumma.

The organ has an intricate history, incorporating a small eighteenth-century positive organ originally built for a Stockholm church, which was later moved, altered and restored several times before reaching its present form in the 1970s. Visitors with an interest in organs may find its layered history of particular note, though the instrument's fuller technical history is a specialist subject.