Faringe kyrka

Little is known about the earliest church at Faringe, though medieval parchment documents confirm the parish existed by the 1200s. Whether that first church stood on exactly the same spot as today's building remains uncertain. The current structure, a single-hall church with a rectangular nave and matching chancel, was built of rendered natural stone at the close of the medieval period, with a porch added slightly later and a sacristy rebuilt in 1755 on older foundations that may themselves date to the 1200s or 1300s.

The porch retains the church's most significant decorative feature: wall paintings created in 1515 by an artist known as Lars målare, a burgher of Uppsala. Although the paintings elsewhere in the church were whitewashed over in the eighteenth century and survive only as scattered traces, those in the porch are the best preserved, even if fragmentary and difficult to read today. A restoration in 1929, led by architect Dag Melin, reinstated a mid-1600s gallery screen that had been discovered stored in the detached bell tower to the west, itself dating from 1668.

Several furnishings are thought to predate the present building and may have come from an earlier wooden church. The font, carved from sandstone, is believed to date from around the mid-1200s, making it the oldest object in the church. A large triumphal crucifix from the first half of the 1400s hangs in its traditional position on the chancel arch. Wall-mounted saint figures, originally part of a fifteenth-century altar cabinet, also survive, alongside medieval iron light fittings, a censer and a small bronze bell.

The communion vessels are a particular curiosity, combining parts from three different periods: a richly decorated medieval centrepiece adorned with vine leaves and grapes, a base added in the late 1600s and a bowl from 1805. The pulpit, on the north wall, was made in 1739 by the Stockholm sculptor Gottlob Rosenberg. The altarpiece, depicting the entombment of Christ, was painted in 1801, with its surrounding altar structure completed the following year. The current organ, built in 1990, incorporates pipework surviving from an earlier nineteenth-century instrument.