Östra Broby kyrka

According to local folklore, the church was originally intended for Glimminge, a little way north of Broby, but trolls kept tearing down by night whatever was built during the day, so the church was eventually raised in Broby instead. A Romanesque stone church with a broad west tower is recorded as standing here by the late twelfth century, built of granite rubble with brick vaulting and later additions.

By the mid-nineteenth century this medieval church had become too small and too dilapidated for the growing parish, and it was demolished in 1869. A new church, designed by the Danish architect Ludvig Vold and built by the Malmö master builder Nils Andersson, was completed in 1873 on roughly the same site, large enough to seat more than 800 people. Its fittings, including the old altar and pulpit, were auctioned off, and stone from the medieval church is said to have been used to fill in marshland nearby.

This Victorian-era church stood for less than sixty years. On the evening of 6 March 1930, only hours after a Passion service, fire broke out and the roof collapsed; the building could not be saved. In the aftermath it was decided to retain much of the surviving nineteenth-century masonry rather than start entirely afresh.

The church seen today, designed by the architect Sven Wranér and consecrated by Bishop Rodhe on 14 August 1932, incorporates these older walls together with a partly new tower, new roof and new interior. It takes the form of a cross-shaped stone church, and its interior is notably plain, a direct consequence of the losses suffered in the fire.

Among the furnishings, a handsome oak cabinet was made from surviving fragments of the medieval altar table and pulpit carved by Petter Norrman, its doors decorated with figures of the four evangelists. The altarpiece, a triptych by the Swedish-French artist Rudolf Gowenius, depicts the Crucifixion flanked by the Nativity and the Resurrection. The font is of limestone from Ignaberga, acquired when the current church was built, and the two bells were cast in Ystad in 1930. The pneumatic organ, built in 1932 by E. A. Setterquist & Son of Örebro, replaced an earlier nineteenth-century instrument lost in the fire.