Köpings kyrka

The church visitors see today is actually the fourth building on this site. Tradition suggests the earliest church, possibly a stave church, dated from the 11th century, and was succeeded by a large limestone church in the 12th century. A church known as Jämmertuna kyrka, built in the 14th century, burned down in 1437 and was rebuilt in the 1440s, reusing some of the earlier masonry; parts of this medieval fabric are said to survive in the roof space. A slender spire was added in 1626, and a major rebuilding at the end of the seventeenth century, based on drawings by the architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger from 1687, gave the church its present three-sided chancel. The rebuilt church was reconsecrated in 1706, and the upper tower and spire followed between 1734 and 1741.

The building is a three-aisled church with external buttresses, a three-sided chancel, and a west tower built into the nave. Its walls are of locally made brick, rendered smooth and colour-washed white, with round-arched windows fitted with black-painted cast-iron frames. The nave has a copper-clad roof and the tower a Baroque-style copper spire. Inside, the nave is divided by eight square masonry piers supporting fifteen whitewashed groin vaults, with traces of medieval wall paintings surviving here and there.

Among the furnishings, a medieval altar cabinet made in northern Germany around 1520 forms the centrepiece of the chancel, alongside a stone altar dated to 1734. A sandstone font from the early sixteenth century, likely made in the Svealand region, also survives. The pulpit was commissioned in 1728 from Gottlob Rosenberg of Stockholm and remains a striking pale grey and gilt piece; fragments of its seventeenth-century predecessor, from 1629, are preserved on the sacristy wall. The pews and screens date from an 1880 refurbishment in a Neo-Gothic style, and the floor incorporates limestone slabs, some cut from older gravestones. Wall memorials from the 1600s and 1700s add further historical interest.

The church has had a succession of organs. An instrument existed before 1633, when Georg Hermann of Södertälje built an eighteen-stop organ; this was followed by an early eighteenth-century organ by Johan Niclas Cahman, later enlarged, and then a substantial new organ in 1895 by E A Setterquist & Son of Örebro. Part of that 1895 instrument's facade and some of its pipework were retained when the current 45-stop organ, built by the Danish firm Bruno Christensen & Sønner, was installed in 1975.