Djura kyrka

Before the 1600s the district had no church of its own, and villagers travelled to neighbouring Gagnef to worship. A first chapel was built at Djura in 1648, a simple rectangular log building with a chancel, sacristy and porch, and a timber bell tower at its western end. This chapel was renovated in 1703, when it was clad in wooden shingles and painted red throughout.

The present church was built in 1780, reusing timber from the original chapel, and the shingle-clad bell tower was retained and incorporated into the new building. The porch was removed in 1892 but rebuilt in 1954 as a reconstruction of the earlier one. A major renovation in 1914 restored a door to the pulpit, whitewashed the interior and introduced electric lighting. Further extensive work in 1997 replaced parts of the timber frame, widened the porch doors and saw the whole church replastered and repainted; a gallery screen removed in 1954 was reinstated along with its columns.

The building is of horizontal log construction, with a nave, an eastern chancel and a sacristy beyond it. A red-painted, shingle-clad bell tower is attached to the west gable, and the roof is a hipped mansard form. The wooden barrel vault of the nave was rendered and whitewashed in the 1830s, covering earlier folk-art paintings on biblical themes that had decorated the walls and ceiling. The brick floor dates from the 1954 restoration, replacing an earlier wooden floor with a cemented central aisle.

Among the furnishings, the altarpiece was made in 1781 and its painting of Christ in Gethsemane was added in 1833 by the Falun artist Anders Richman. The Gustavian-style pulpit, the church's third, was made in 1788 using Gagnef church's pulpit as a model, and is paired with an hourglass dated 1690. An antependium was fashioned from a cope dating from the late fifteenth century, and the wooden font, first recorded in 1735, was painted white in 1923 before later regaining its original red and green colouring. Three brass chandeliers hang in the nave, the oldest dated to 1678.

The church's organ history is unusually eventful for such a small building: instruments were brought here from Gagnef and Leksand churches during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including one originally built in 1724 by the noted organ builder Johan Niclas Cahman, whose case and mechanism are now preserved at the Museum of Performing Arts in Stockholm. The current gallery organ dates from 1980, with a smaller chancel organ added in 1999.