Bjälbo kyrka

The site has deep roots: remains of an earlier wooden stave church were found around 100 metres north of the present building, and there are hints that this in turn may have had a still earlier predecessor. The stone church seen today was originally built in the first half of the 1100s, with a rectangular nave and a narrower chancel and apse, on land that had been the principal estate of the Bjälbo family (the Folkunga dynasty) during the 1100s and 1200s.

The church's most memorable feature is its huge west tower, unusually broad and powerful for its size, and among the tallest in Östergötland at around 37.5 metres. Tree-ring dating of timbers suggests it was completed shortly after 1220, and it is thought to have been commissioned by Ingrid Ylva, widow of Magnus Minnesköld, since the dating rules out her husband and predecessor Birger Brosa. The tower originally had six storeys, serving at various times as living quarters, grain storage, a refuge in troubled times, and probably as a gathering place befitting the family's ambitions; a room on the second floor is still known as "Queen Ylva's chamber".

In the 1780s the medieval chancel and apse were demolished and the church took on its present form, with the nave extended eastward and joined to a new, semicircular chancel wall, while the ancient tower was left largely untouched. Two runestones (Ög 64 and Ög 66) stand by the church, evidence of the site's importance in the Viking Age; a third, Ög 65, once stood here too but has since been lost. During drainage works in 1954 the lid of a runic-carved Eskilstuna stone coffin was discovered and is now kept in the tower.

Inside, the altarpiece was painted by Pehr Hörberg in 1810, and a fifteenth-century altar cabinet is displayed on the church's south wall. The organ loft is decorated with images of the apostles, painted in 1760 by the Vadstena church painter Sven Gustafsson Stoltz. The church's finely decorated wrought-iron door is dated to the 1200s, and the font to 1658.