Hjo kyrka

The medieval church at Hjo, thought to date from the late 1200s or early 1300s, combined a stone chancel with a timber-built nave, spire and detached bell tower. It was destroyed by fire in 1794, with only a handful of furnishings saved. The present church was completed in 1799 to designs from the Överintendentsämbetet (the Office of the Royal Superintendent), built by master builder Johan Bergman, though it reportedly took some twenty years before the interior fittings were fully in place.

The building is a rectangular hall church with rounded, apse-like end walls to east and west, the western apse housing the organ loft and the eastern serving as the chancel. A side-set tower rises from the middle of the south wall, facing the sacristy opposite on the north side. The rendered walls, with exposed quoins at the corners, are pierced by round-arched window openings, and the interior is covered by a barrel vault, with groin vaults over the two apses.

A substantial restoration around 1900–1902, led by Adrian Crispin Peterson, gave the tower its tall, pointed spire and altered much of the interior, though most of these changes were later reversed. The stained glass in the chancel windows, made by Reinhold Callmander during that restoration, remains in place. A further restoration in 1937–1938 sought to recover the church's original Gustavian character, and work in 1978 altered the western end of the building, including the creation of small rooms beneath the organ loft.

The pulpit, designed by Ludvig Hawerman, was installed in the north-east corner of the nave in 1859; it was moved and given a new staircase in 1938, and its panels received carved figures by Axel Andersson of Morup in 1940. The organ case on the west gallery, also designed by Hawerman and built by Sven Fogelberg for the 1859 instrument, survives as a silent facade forming, together with the gallery, a notable architectural ensemble at the west end of the church; the working organ behind it dates mainly from 1911, with later rebuilding.