On Monday, June 3rd, Kiruna church will be closed – over two years before it opens again.
The church weighs 600 tons, is 40 meters wide and 40 meters long and will be moved from the old Kiruna center to the new one. Now the preparations for the move enter the next stage.
The move of the over 100-year-old wooden church has been described as the most spectacular house move in Kiruna’s urban transformation. The roughly 600-ton church is the largest wooden building ever moved in Sweden, and the reason is mining.
Lena Tjärnberg is a parish priest in Kiruna parish and has had Kiruna church as part of her workplace for nearly ten years.
– It feels real now. We’ve been talking about it for so long, but now the sadness starts to set in. Both for the plastic and because we will not have access to the church. So it feels.
What does the church mean to you?
– It means an awful lot. For me it is the soul of Kiruna. This church, it’s where the heart beats.
Years of preparation – two days to move
The move of the church will only take place next summer, but the preparations have been going on for a long time. Now the next phase begins. When the church closes, all loose fixtures in the church must be secured. And moving such a large building in its entirety has its challenges.
– The biggest challenge is actually the road, because there is only one road we can take. It is the old E10, and it is normally nine meters wide, but now we are in the process of widening it to 24 meters so that we can accommodate the trailers on which the church will be transported, says Stefan Holmblad, project manager at LKAB.
Opens again in 2026
The moving distance between the current location and the new one is five kilometers. With a moving speed of less than 1 km per hour, the actual moving is estimated to take two days. After that, another year of work awaits at the new location before the church once again opens its doors to visitors in the fall of 2026.
– It will be noticed that we do not have access to this very large room. The people of Kiruna will have to adapt to the fact that during this time we can use premises that do not hold as many people, says Lena Tjärnberg.