Nidaros Cathedral

Where it sits. Nidaros Cathedral stands in the centre of Trondheim, on the peninsula formed by a loop of the Nidelva river a few hundred metres before it reaches the Trondheimsfjord. It is the largest medieval building in Norway and the northernmost cathedral of its kind in Europe: roughly 102 metres long, about 50 metres across the transepts, with a central tower rising close to a hundred metres above the crossing. The Archbishop's Palace, Erkebispegården, adjoins it to the south, and the wooden warehouses of Bakklandet line the river a short walk east across the Old Town Bridge.

Why it is here. Everything about the building follows from one grave. Olav Haraldsson, king of Norway, was killed at the Battle of Stiklestad on 29 July 1030, about 90 kilometres north of here, in a failed attempt to regain his throne. His body was carried to Nidaros — the medieval name for Trondheim — and buried by the river. Reports of miracles followed, he was declared a saint in 1031, and his shrine became the principal pilgrimage destination of northern Europe. A wooden chapel gave way to a stone church, and from about 1070 under Olav Kyrre a far larger building was begun over the site. When Norway was granted its own archbishopric in 1152, Nidaros became its seat, with authority reaching over Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, Orkney, Shetland and the Isle of Man — a jurisdiction that maps the Norse North Atlantic almost exactly.

How it was built. The oldest surviving fabric is the transept, in a heavy Anglo-Norman Romanesque of the mid-twelfth century. From about 1180 the work turned Gothic, and the influence is unmistakably English rather than French: Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson spent three years in exile in England around 1180 and returned with ideas from Lincoln and Canterbury, visible in the octagon — the eight-sided chancel built to house Olav's shrine and allow pilgrims to circulate around it — and in the detailing of the nave and the great west front. The stone is local: greenschist and soapstone quarried in the surrounding district, soft enough to carve finely and giving the exterior its grey-green cast. Building continued into the fourteenth century and stopped, incomplete, with the Black Death and the decline of the archbishopric.

Fire, ruin and a century of rebuilding. The cathedral burned repeatedly — in 1328, 1432, 1531 and catastrophically in 1708, which left little but stone walls, followed by a lightning fire in 1719. For much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it stood partly roofless with the nave in ruin. Restoration began in 1869 and did not formally conclude until 2001, running through architects including Heinrich Ernst Schirmer, Christian Christie, Olaf Nordhagen and Helge Thiis. The west front, with its tiers of figures, was rebuilt between 1901 and the 1980s, and most of its sculpture is twentieth-century work in a medieval idiom — Gustav Vigeland among the sculptors who contributed early figures. The rose window and the great stained-glass programme are the work of Gabriel Kielland, executed between 1913 and the 1930s. Visitors are often surprised to learn how much of what reads as medieval was carved within living memory of their grandparents; the cathedral's own guides are straightforward about it, and the original medieval sculpture is displayed next door in the Archbishop's Palace museum.

A national church, and a pilgrim route. Norwegian monarchs were crowned here from 1818, when Karl Johan was crowned, until 1906 and Haakon VII; the constitution replaced coronation with a consecration service in 1908, and Olav V in 1958 and Harald V and Queen Sonja in 1991 received their blessing at the same altar. The crown regalia are kept in the Archbishop's Palace. The medieval pilgrim routes have been revived as the St Olav Ways, the best-known running 643 kilometres from Oslo through the Gudbrandsdalen valley; walkers who complete it collect a certificate at the pilgrim centre beside the cathedral. The feast of St Olav on 29 July anchors Olavsfest, a week of concerts, liturgy and markets.

Saga history against screen history. Olav Haraldsson is a genuinely documented figure — recorded in skaldic verse composed within his lifetime, in Adam of Bremen, and at length in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla — and Nidaros is the physical consequence of his death. That makes it a useful counterweight to the television version of the Norse world. The dramas that popularised the Viking Age, including the series covering the eleventh-century generation of Harald Hardrada and Leif Erikson, were filmed in Ireland at Ashford Studios and in the Wicklow countryside, not in Trøndelag. The cathedral is not a set: it is the building that a real cult of a real king produced, still in daily liturgical use.

Visiting. The cathedral, the Archbishop's Palace museum and the regalia are covered by a combined ticket, and the tower can be climbed in summer by guided groups on a narrow spiral stair. Trondheim is reached by air to Værnes, by the Dovre railway from Oslo in about seven hours, and by the coastal ships that call daily.