Katarina kyrka, Stockholm

Katarina kyrka is the church you are looking at, rising from Södermalm in Stockholm. Its form belongs to baroque architecture, and Jean de la Vallée prepared the design. Construction ran from 1656 to 1695, producing a church with a Greek-cross plan and a tower placed at its crossing.

The church takes its name from Princess Catherine, the mother of King Charles X Gustav. Its history is marked by fire and renewal. A major blaze destroyed the building in 1723; the rebuilding gave it a larger, octagonal tower.

Then, on 17 May 1990, fire brought down the tower and left almost everything gone except the outer walls. The church reopened in 1995, rebuilt with techniques and materials associated with its seventeenth-century construction. Look at the tower’s clock faces: after the fire, the original mechanical mechanism was replaced by four electric movements, one serving each clock face, linked by GPS to the atomic clock in Frankfurt.

Inside, the rebuilt church has a new organ made by J. L. van den Heuvel Orgelbouw. The cemetery around the church includes Anna Lindh, Cornelis Vreeswijk, Sven Bergqvist, Einár, and Sten Sture the Elder.