Ununge Church (Swedish : Ununge kyrka) is a medieval church belonging to the Church of Sweden in the Diocese of Uppsala.
Swedish is a North Germanic language spoken natively by 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden, and in parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to some extent with Danish, although the degree of mutual intelligibility is largely dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker. Both Norwegian and Danish are generally easier for Swedish speakers to read than to listen to because of difference in accent and tone when speaking. Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It has the most speakers of the North Germanic languages.
The Church of Sweden is an Evangelical Lutheran national church in Sweden. A former state church, headquartered in Uppsala, with 6.0 million baptised members at year end 2017 it is the largest Christian denomination in Sweden.
The church was probably built at the end of the 13th century, but has been rebuilt and expanded on several occasions. The easternmost part of the church has been dated to the end of the 14th or to the 15th century. In its layout, the church is a typical example of medieval churches from Uppland. It consists of a rectangular, single-nave church hall consisting of three bays of which the easternmost is the choir. There is a sacristy to the north and a church porch to the south. The oldest of the church fittings are the triumphal cross from the 13th century, which has been described as one of the finest of its kind and Sweden and which resembles contemporary triumphal crosses from Denmark, and the baptismal font, also from the 13th century. The interior of the church was renovated in 1897. [1] [2]
Uppland is a historical province or landskap on the eastern coast of Sweden, just north of Stockholm, the capital. It borders Södermanland, Västmanland and Gästrikland. It is also bounded by lake Mälaren and the Baltic sea. On the small uninhabited island of Märket in the Baltic, Uppland has a very short and unusually shaped land border with Åland, an autonomous province of Finland.
In architecture, a bay is the space between architectural elements, or a recess or compartment. Bay comes from Old French baee, meaning an opening or hole.
A choir, also sometimes called quire, is the area of a church or cathedral that provides seating for the clergy and church choir. It is in the western part of the chancel, between the nave and the sanctuary, which houses the altar and Church tabernacle. In larger medieval churches it contained choir-stalls, seating aligned with the side of the church, so at right-angles to the seating for the congregation in the nave. Smaller medieval churches may not have a choir in the architectural sense at all, and they are often lacking in churches built by all denominations after the Protestant Reformation, though the Gothic Revival revived them as a distinct feature.
