A lasting monument to a nation’s craftsmen

HOPPERSTAD stave church sits atop a hill, which is not remarkable in Norway where so much of the country is hills.

As we rode into Vik on the bus, I had begun to wonder how I would find the church. As if in answer, the unmistakable wooden steeple appeared as the bus crested one hill, only to disappear again. By the time we got to the bus station, I had only a vague sense of where it was. I walked toward the church, heartened by signs along the way, but the hills and the curves did not let me see the building until it was practically on top of me. I stopped to let that first sight fill my imagination of what visitors must have felt a thousand years ago as they hurried to church.

The things that survive, such as Hopperstad stave church – all 2000 wooden pieces of it – tend to be those things that either are carefully cherished or are forgotten.

Some of the stave churches have survived because they were taken on as local parish churches – adapted and altered to suit different times and tastes, but preserved. Many more were destroyed because the site became more valuable than the building itself. Those isolated often were subject to fire or decay. Hopperstad was in that state when one man, Peter Blix, stepped in to reclaim it.

HOPPERSTAD, suffering from neglect, was to be pulled down as soon as the new Vik Church was built in 1877. Delays in the opening of the new church made it possible for The Society for the Preservation of Monuments to purchase the building in 1881. Peter Blix, an architect, worked to preserve and reconstruct pieces of the church based on examples from other stave churches. He chose to be buried in the floor of the church that became his life’s work.

Hopperstad is a tribute not only to the work of Peter Blix but also to the unnamed travelling craftsmen who spent years preparing the materials for the church.

The trees destined to become the 20-foot "staves", or weight-bearing columns of the central room of the church, were carefully selected from core pine trees that had grown untouched for several hundred years and were left for several summers to dry on the root. According to the guide book, the pine contains a resin which acts as a natural impregnating agent.

The construction also reflects a thorough understanding both of materials and engineering. For the most part these travelling craftsmen are anonymous and much of their lore may well have died with the Black Death, which marked the end of the building of stave churches and reduced the population by two-thirds.

THE stave churches and the travelling craftsmen were not limited to Norway, but only in Norway do they survive as a testament to an era and a window into a craft tradition. Standing in the central nave of the church, I felt safely enclosed and set apart from the world by those ancient columns.

They reminded me of the sentinel tree enclosing, protecting the white clapboard church of Village Creek. I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent of pine and dust and listened for the echoes of the people whose lives had passed through this church.

The best souvenir of Norway, the one thing uniquely Norwegian, is not something I could pack into my suitcase but something I can hold onto forever.