Hillesøy Church

Going to Hillesøy Church used to mean getting in a boat, and not for a leisurely Sunday cruise. The church was on the island of Hillesøya, one fjord journey away from most of its parishioners.

Of course, these were people accustomed to stormy seas, bitter winters, and months of darkness. Hillesøy sits entirely north of the Arctic Circle and has long supplied Europe with stockfish, cod, haddock, and herring.

But the number of people willing to brave Norwegian waters to worship on Hillesøya island was a problem. Not because there were too few, but because there were too many. The original church was built in the late 1500s and seated just 150 people. By the 1800s, that number was not enough.

The solution was to construct a larger church in Brensholmen, a site more central to the parish community where fewer would have to boat, though transport via sleighs or snowshoes certainly weren’t out of the question.

The current church was built in 1889, but contains treasures much older than that. Medieval altarpiece cabinets from Lübeck and the Netherlands were brought over from the old church, arriving along the same trade routes that brought Norwegian fish to the rest of Europe. Turns out that an Arctic fishing community on the top of the map had quite a big world below it.