Järstads kyrka

The church likely began as a rectangular nave with a narrower chancel, built during the mid-13th century. Its use of brick was unusual for a rural parish church of this period; the material had recently been introduced to medieval Sweden by the Dominicans, and its use here is thought to echo the great brick churches of Skänninge, such as Vårfrukyrkan. The brick is said to have come from a Skänninge brickworks.

Over time the building was extended and altered considerably. A porch was added on the south side and a sacristy to the north, both thought to have late-medieval origins, though the present sacristy dates from 1896. The nave was lengthened westward, probably in the 14th century, using grey stone and some limestone; the west gable displays decorative blind brick arcading. The chancel was rebuilt and enlarged in 1685. A tower was raised in 1740 after the earlier freestanding bell frame blew down in a storm in 1737, damaging the roof and vault. The whole exterior was whitewashed in 1817, covering the original red-painted brick and stone.

Inside, medieval ribbed vaults carry wall and ceiling paintings believed to date from the 1360s or 1370s, depicting the Last Judgement and scenes from the life of Christ. These were painted over in the 18th century and only rediscovered and restored in 1990, with further conservation work on walls and woodwork carried out in the early 1990s. The church retains a 13th-century font and two 15th-century sculptures, though its most valuable medieval object, a fine altar cabinet made in Lübeck around 1425, was removed in 1847 and is now held by the Swedish Academy of Letters, kept at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm. The current altarpiece was painted in 1700 by Nathanael Werwing Helsing, originally part of a memorial epitaph for a Linköping cathedral official's parents.

The churchyard holds a distinctive gravestone from 1603, carved with two crossed weaving shuttles, thought to mark the graves of two women who worked as weavers for Vadstena Castle. A runic stone stands by the porch and south wall, raised, according to its inscription, by a brother in memory of his sister — one of many such memorial stones surviving from the Viking Age in the region.

The church is first mentioned in documentary sources only in 1399, despite the surrounding village being recorded as early as 1331, so much about its origins remains uncertain. Records from this period list its books and liturgical items, most of which were lost, along with much of its medieval silver, during Gustav Vasa's confiscations in the 16th century; only a chalice and pyxis were left behind.