Swedes were among the first to embrace slow travel and slow food – but this is the summer of slow television.
On Tuesday, a record number of Swedish viewers tuned in to watch as a landmark church was relocated – in one piece – five kilometres from where it has stood for 113 years.
The future of the hulking Kiruna church, 145km north of the Arctic Circle, was at risk due to subsidence caused by nearby iron ore mining.
Instead of waiting for disaster to strike, city authorities hoisted the church on to a low trailer and began the slow move on Tuesday. But only after a blessing and godspeed from the local pastor Lena Tjärnberg.
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“The last day you go down the stairs and close the church door, you know it’s going to be several years before you can open it – and in a new place,” she said.
“We don’t know how it’s going to feel to open the door again.”
Speed is not the issue here: the movers are aiming for 500m an hour but the church managed just 30m in its first hour, the wheels grinding slowly under the 672-tonne weight.”
Watching everything closely was project manager Stefan Holmblad Johansson, who said the greatest challenge was widening the roads ahead of the move.
“It’s a historic event, a very big and complex operation with no margin of error,” he said. “But everything is under control.”
He described the church – 35 metres high and a largely triangular in structure – as solid and well-suited for moving. Not to take any chances, church art and the organ were secured pre-move.
For the next two days, steel beams under the floor have been fixed to keep everything else stable.
The man at the controls of the 200-wheel trailer, Kees Breedveld from the Dutch company Mammoet, said everything was straightforward enough: “It’s actually like a remote controlled car that you have as a kid and more or less the same – only with more options”.
Swedish law forbids mining under buildings so dozens of buildings in Kiruna - and thousands of people - have already been moved as part of a 30-year project.
A new town centre was inaugurated in 2022 as part of the €900 million relocation plan, financed by LKAB, a state-owned mining company, and expected to continue for another two decades.
Until now, though, Kiruna has never attempted anything quite like the church move. Large crowds lined the route streets amid fair weather as the structure began to move, including a large number of tourists.
Lena Edkvist, visiting from Gothenburg, said the move interested her more for cultural than religious reasons. “It feels like an honour that they’re moving it intact instead of dismantling it piece by piece,” she said.
Some locals watched the move with mixed feelings. “It’s really sad, this is one of the landmarks leaving,” said local woman Frida Albertson. “It’s all disappearing, what I grew up with, it’s just sad.”
After eight years of planning, an estimated cost of €42 million and an early-morning blessing, a church in northern Sweden began a slow-motion 5km journey on Tuesday to make way for the expansion of Europe’s biggest underground mine.
The 672-tonne Kiruna Kyrka, a Swedish Lutheran church inaugurated in 1912, is to be slowly rolled to its new home over two days, at a pace of 500 metres an hour.
In a huge multi-decade operation, the whole of the Arctic town is being moved as an iron-ore mine operated by the state-owned mining company LKAB weakens the ground, threatening to swallow the town.
More than 10,000 people, including the Swedish king, Carl XVI Gustaf, are expected to line the streets – which have been widened especially to accommodate the church – to see the move of the red wooden building.
The operation was tested successfully on a 30-metre stretch over the weekend.
In the latest version of “slow TV”, dozens of cameras have been set up along the route to enable people across Sweden and the world to watch what is being billed by the broadcaster SVT as “Den stora kyrkflytten” (“The big church move”).
The church, designed by Gustaf Wickman, is one of Sweden’s most-loved older buildings. It is known for its architecture that resembles a lávvu (a Sámi hut).
On Wednesday, a church service and coffee event will be held in an attempt to break a world record for church coffee. There will also be musical entertainment, including a concert with the singer Carola.
The church is expected to reopen at its new location at the end of next year, but the city’s entire relocation is not expected to be completed until 2035.
The church is one of 23 cultural buildings being relocated in what LKAB has described as “a unique event in world history”. The mine’s operator gave residents the option to either financially compensate those affected by the town’s relocation or rebuild homes or buildings.
The expansion has attracted criticism, including from some Sámi people who fear that fragmentation of the land will make reindeer herding more difficult.
“When it came to the church, we decided it was best to move it in one piece. We saw the value in that,” the LKAB project manager, Stefan Holmblad Johansson, told the AFP news agency. “It is with great reverence we have undertaken this project. This is not just any building; it’s a church.”
The altarpiece, a pastel landscape by the late Swedish Prince Eugen, and the pipe organ, which has more than 2,000 pipes, have been carefully wrapped for the journey, and the ground around the church’s former location dug out so that beams could be placed underneath.
“The church is sitting on a beam system, then two rows of trailers were brought in,” Mr Holmblad Johansson said. These were slid underneath the beams.
The bell tower, which is a separate structure, will be moved next week. – The Guardian
