Flesberg stave church is a stave church

Stave church

A stave church is a medieval wooden church with a post and beam construction related to timber framing. The wall frames are filled with vertical planks. The load-bearing posts have lent their name to the building technique...

 located in Flesberg

Flesberg

Flesberg is a municipality in Buskerud county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Numedal. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Lampeland....

, Numedal

Numedal

Numedal is a traditional district and valley Buskerud, Norway. Running north–south, it extends between Kongsberg in the south to Rødberg in the north, passing through the municipalities of Kongsberg, Flesberg, Rollag and Nore og Uvdal.. The river Numedalslågen, the third-longest in the country,...

 in Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

. It was probably built around 1200. The first written reference to the church is from 1359. The church was originally a single nave church (type B) with four free-standing internal posts bearing a raised central roof, surrounded by an ambulatory or aisles on all four sides. It had a narrower chancel, also with a raised central roof, and a semicircular apse

Apse

In architecture, the apse is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault or semi-dome...

. It was completely surrounded by a gallery loosely connected to the plank walls.

In 1735 the chancel and apse as well as the east wall of the nave were removed. The nave was extended eastwards and two transepts were added, making a cruciform plan. The additions were built in horizontal log construction with notched corners. Of the original stave church only three outer walls survived, as the internal posts and the raised roof were eliminated.

External links

• Flesberg stave church, Directorate for Cultural Heritage — in Norwegian
• Flesberg stave church in Stavkirke.org — in Norwegian
• Flesberg stave church in a video about churches in Numedal — in English