Hycklinge kyrka

A church is thought to have stood at Hycklinge since the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, a date suggested by a Romanesque font bowl later rediscovered and now kept among the church's furnishings. The first stone church was small and towerless, with bells hung in a separate wooden frame; an eighteenth-century description records a painted altarpiece and ceiling decorations from the medieval period, though later commentators have questioned some details of the description.

By the 1760s the medieval church had become too cramped, and plans for enlargement eventually led to a complete rebuilding. A rococo-style church designed by Olof Tempelman was built in the late 1770s, but its walls, set directly on the ground without adequate foundations, cracked within a few years and the building had to be demolished after only thirteen years, leaving only the tower standing. A new design by Per Wilhelm Palmroth, in the stricter neoclassical taste then coming into fashion, produced the church seen today, completed in 1792.

The interior is a plain rectangular hall with a grey-limewashed wooden barrel vault and large round-arched windows. The most striking feature is the altarpiece depicting the Crucifixion, painted by Pehr Hörberg and donated in 1794; Hörberg is said to have included a self-portrait among the subsidiary figures. He also painted royal portraits on the organ gallery and medallions on the gallery front, giving the church a notable concentration of his work.

Among the older fittings are a silver chalice with a fifteenth-century foot and stem, a silver paten of similar age engraved with the Lamb of God, and a fifteenth-century copper-alloy censer with pierced and chased ornament. A grave slab commemorates a knight who died in 1333. The church also holds a pulpit made by a local joiner shortly before 1850.

The church's organ history is unusually well documented. An early instrument built in 1810 by Pehr Schiörlin was later given to a Stockholm museum, and its façade was eventually reproduced for a new mechanical organ installed in 1975 by the Robert Gustavsson workshop of Härnösand, so the case visitors see today echoes the original early nineteenth-century design even though the surviving Schiörlin pipework itself is preserved elsewhere.