Offerdals kyrka

The earliest church on this site was begun in the mid-1100s as a small fortified church with an apse, one of four so-called 'fjärding' churches that served the quarters into which Jämtland was then divided. Similar apse churches once stood at Västerhus on Frösön and in neighbouring Alsen parish, though only the example at Hackås survives intact today.

Following the Reformation, which reached Offerdal in 1536 under Danish-Norwegian rule, the church was rebuilt during the 1600s. By the 1760s the congregation had outgrown the old building: in 1766 much of it was demolished and a new church roughly four times larger was raised, said to date from 1758. Subsequent renovations have altered the exterior further, and an archaeological investigation took place in 1990.

Despite the rebuilding, Offerdal preserves a notable range of medieval objects. Two processional light-staves used in Catholic-era ceremonies stand at the front of the pews, alongside a censer dated to the 1200s or 1300s and an iron chandelier and ship-shaped candle-holder from the 1400s. The door from the older church has also been kept. A winged font angel from 1716 holds the basin for baptisms, while a communion chalice from the 1610s, known as the Offerdal Chalice, and a guild vessel called Stor-Gertrud from 1690 add further interest.

The church organ has a layered history: an eight-stop instrument was built in 1753 by Carl Holm of Uppsala, later enlarged, then replaced in 1882 by a fourteen-stop organ from E A Setterquist & Son of Örebro. The current organ, built in 1953 by Olof Hammarberg of Gothenburg, retains the façade and stops from the 1882 instrument within its electric mechanism.

In the churchyard stands a memorial stone to the celebrated fiddler Lapp-Nils (1804–1870), designed by the Jämtland sculptor Olof Ahlberg and unveiled in 1943, when a fiddler who had carried on his musical tradition performed at the ceremony.