In 1883 a Bergen consul named Fredrik Georg Gade bought a condemned building. The parish at Fortun, at the inner end of the Sognefjord, had put up a new church in 1879 and had no further use for the old one, a stave church raised in the middle of the twelfth century and dated by the usual reckoning to around 1150. It was to come down. Gade paid for the materials, had them taken apart, shipped south and raised again on his own estate at Fantoft outside Bergen, where it served as a family chapel. A private man moved a medieval church a hundred and fifty kilometres because he did not want it demolished. That is the building this article is about, and almost nothing written on the subject in the last thirty years mentions any of it.
A stave church is not a log cabin with a spire on it. It is a frame of upright staves standing on a raised sill on stone footings, jointed without much iron, clad in shingle and tarred every few years so the pine keeps the water out, and the whole method died out so completely that when this one had to be rebuilt in the nineties nobody alive had built a new one. Norway may have had as many as two thousand of them. Twenty eight originals are still standing. The norwegian church burnings took one of the count out in under an hour.
6 June 1992
The fire service was called out to Fantoft at about a quarter to six on the morning of 6 June 1992. Tarred pine, five or six centuries of it in the timbers and a hundred and nine years on that particular hill, does not give a brigade much to work with. The frame was gone before the morning was properly light. Nobody was hurt. Nobody has ever been convicted of setting it.
The first assumption was lightning or a fault in the wiring, which is what such an assumption usually is in a country with a lot of old wooden buildings and a lot of weather. Two items came out of the site intact: a wish stone, which is now set into one wall of the replacement, and the cross from the altar. Everything else that had come down the fjord in 1883 was ash.
The photograph
Some time after the fire a photographer named Are Mundal went up to the site and shot the ruin. By his own account, given on the artist's official site, he did it because Varg Vikernes asked him to. The picture is a plain documentary frame: black beams at angles, the hill behind, no people in it.
In March 1993 that photograph went out on the cover of Aske, a three track record by Burzum recorded at the Grieg Hall in Bergen across 1992 and released by Deathlike Silence Productions in Oslo. Tomas Haugen of Emperor, who records as Samoth, played bass on two of the three tracks and was later convicted of the arson at Skjold Church. The title is the Norwegian word for ashes.
Whatever else that sleeve is, it is a photograph of a destroyed building sold as merchandise while the police were still working the case, and it did more to fasten this music to arson than any interview, any court report and any book has managed since. Sleeves are usually paintings. This one was evidence of something, and it was on sale in shops.
A photograph of a destroyed building, sold as merchandise while the case was still open. Sleeves are usually paintings.
Why this one and not the others
More than fifty Christian buildings were attacked in Norway between 1992 and 1996 and only a handful are ever named. Fantoft is named every time, and the reason is not the sleeve alone. Look at what the fires of 1992 actually took, by the age of the fabric:
- Fantoft, a stave church of around 1150, moved from Fortun to Fana in 1883
- The old church at Åsane, a stone building of 1795
- The Methodist church in Sarpsborg, built in 1857
- Skjold in Vindafjord, consecrated on 26 October 1887
- Holmenkollen Chapel above Oslo, put up in 1903 and given over to church use in 1913
One medieval building and four parish churches of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Every one of those losses fell on a congregation that had to pay to replace it, and four of them are replaceable in the ordinary sense that a building can be rebuilt to the same purpose. The fifth was a piece of the country's oldest surviving carpentry, and once the roof went there was no equivalent left to lose. The attempt on the stave church at Gol on 16 May 1994 failed. Had it not, the count of twenty eight would now be twenty seven.
What the court did with it
The picture arrived in public two months after the newspaper piece that made the fires a police matter. On 20 January 1993 the Bergen daily Bergens Tidende ran an anonymous interview obtained by the journalist Finn Bjørn Tønder, under a headline that translates as we set fire to the churches. Vikernes was arrested within days and released for want of evidence. He has said since that he exaggerated a great deal in that conversation, and he has consistently denied setting the Fantoft fire.
At the trial in Oslo in May 1994 he was convicted of three church fires, of one attempted arson, of the killing described in the Feud That Ended in Oslo, and of the theft and storage of 150 kilograms of explosives, and he was sentenced to twenty one years. On Fantoft the jury acquitted him. The judges put on record their view that the acquittal was wrong and left it standing, which is how Norwegian jury procedure worked at the time.
So the most reproduced image in the whole of this genre, an image printed on shirts, on book jackets and on the poster for a feature film released in 2018, belongs to the one fire in the sequence with no convicted arsonist behind it. The building nobody answered for is the building everybody uses.
What was put back
The reconstruction took six years and was finished in 1997, consecrated at the end of that August. The timber came from pines of three hundred and fifty to four hundred years old, grown at around four hundred metres above sea level at Kaupanger, and most of the components had to be cut on site from surveys of the old building and from drawings, because the trade that produced the original had been out of use for six hundred years. That is the practical answer to the question of what an arson costs, and it is measured in trees and in joinery rather than in headlines.
The site has carried a security fence since 1997. The church stands on private ground, opens to visitors for a season each year and charges at the gate, and a proportion of the people who now walk up that hill do so because of a record sleeve rather than because of a twelfth century frame from Fortun. Both things are true, and it is the sleeve rather than the joinery that keeps the gate busy.
The arithmetic is worth stating flatly, because the sleeve does not carry it. Norway had a medieval stave church at Fantoft for a hundred and nine years and now has a very careful replica of one. The count of surviving originals stands at twenty eight, and there is no procedure for putting a twenty ninth back.
