Gärdserums kyrka

The medieval predecessor was a timber-built church with stone chancel and sacristy, dating from around the 1300s. Though small, it was a three-aisled building, and galleries were added on its western and northern sides between 1730 and 1735 to cope with a growing congregation, which by the mid-1800s numbered around 2,500 people. By then the old church could no longer accommodate the parish, and plans for a replacement went ahead.

The present stone church was built between 1851 and 1853 to designs by the architect Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander, with Jonas Jonsson as master builder, making it one of the earliest churches in Sweden built in the neo-Gothic style. The old church held its final service on the fourth Sunday of Advent in 1853, and the first service in the new building was the Christmas morning service that same year, with both churches said to have been lit at once—the old was demolished shortly afterwards, in January 1854. Formal consecration did not take place until some years later, once churchyard extensions and a new organ were complete; sources differ on the exact date, giving either 1857 or, in one account, 16 August rather than 16 April of that year.

The church is three-aisled inside, with spacious galleries above the side aisles, and is notable for its twenty small external towers, an unusual feature for a Swedish parish church of this period. Changes since completion have been modest: the pulpit was moved slightly westward in 1916, and in 1972 the three chancel windows were fitted with stained glass by Eric Elfwén.// 1972 glass credit to Elfwén.

Several furnishings survive from the medieval church, including a triumphal crucifix thought to date from the 1300s, possibly by the same carver responsible for the crucifix in Linköping Cathedral. A funerary hatchment, incomplete, belonging to the Reuter Natt och Dag family is also preserved, said to have been donated by Johan Ritter and his wife Sophia Natt och Dag of Säby (now Bjärka-Säby) following their marriage in the church. A medieval gravestone with a Latin inscription naming a woman called Margareta, daughter of Filip Ulvsson, also survives from the old church, along with communion silver, bronze chandeliers and the great bell.