Roskilde Cathedral: Denmark's Royal Burial Church in Brick
How Roskilde Cathedral became Scandinavia's first Gothic cathedral in brick and the burial church of Danish monarchs, with a walk through its chapels and tips for visiting.
Roskilde is a calm market town about half an hour west of Copenhagen by train. Above its rooftops rise two slim green spires, and beneath them stands one of the most important buildings in Denmark.
Roskilde Cathedral is a working Lutheran church, a royal mausoleum and a UNESCO World Heritage Site all at once. It is also a rare thing: a single building where you can walk through roughly 800 years of European architecture without going back outside.
A church that grew with the Danish kingdom
Roskilde mattered long before the present building existed. Harald Bluetooth made Roskilde a royal seat in the late tenth century and is said to have built a small wooden church here, dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Written sources record that he was buried in it.
That timber church was replaced by a stone cathedral in the eleventh century, built from travertine quarried near Roskilde Fjord. It was a Romanesque basilica with two towers on its west front.
The cathedral you see today was begun around 1170. Bishop Absalon, the churchman who also founded Copenhagen, has traditionally been credited with starting it, although newer research points to his successor, Peder Sunesen, as the main driving force.
Scandinavia's first Gothic cathedral in brick
What makes Roskilde Cathedral special in architectural terms is its material. The art of firing bricks reached Denmark from the south in the twelfth century, and the builders here used it on a scale nobody in Scandinavia had tried before.
The project started out Romanesque, with round arches and heavy walls. Partway through, the plan changed under the influence of the new Gothic style coming from France, so the finished church mixes the two.
The choir was consecrated in 1225 and most of the nave was complete by about 1280. UNESCO describes it as the first Gothic cathedral in Scandinavia to be built of brick, and credits it with spreading Brick Gothic across northern Europe.
If you have seen Grundtvig's Church in Copenhagen, it is worth noticing the family resemblance. Seven centuries apart, both buildings show how much expression Danish builders could get out of plain fired clay.
Why the Roskilde church became a royal mausoleum
Roskilde's role as the burial church of Danish monarchs began with Queen Margrethe I. She died in 1412 and was first buried at Sorø, but her body was moved to Roskilde the following year.
Her alabaster sarcophagus, given by her successor Eric of Pomerania in 1423, still stands directly behind the high altar. Since then, almost every Danish king and queen has been laid to rest here.
That steady stream of royal funerals is the key to understanding the building. Every time the space inside filled up, a new chapel was added, each one in the fashion of its day.
Walking through the chapels
The result is a cathedral that reads almost like a timeline. Here are the main stops, roughly in the order they were built:
The Chapel of the Magi. Christian I founded this Gothic chapel in 1459. Its vaults are covered in frescoes from the 1460s, which were whitewashed over and only rediscovered in 1826.
In the middle stands the King's Pillar, where visiting royals have had their height marked over the centuries. Peter the Great, measured in 1716, is the tallest.
Christian IV's Chapel. Begun in 1614 in Dutch Renaissance style, this red-brick chapel has a stepped gable topped with figures of the Christian virtues. Inside, a wrought-iron screen from 1619 by Caspar Fincke carries the smith's own boastful rhyme.
The interior took more than two centuries to finish. Its large wall paintings by Wilhelm Marstrand were completed in the 1860s.
Frederick V's Chapel. This is the domed, whitewashed neoclassical space, designed by Caspar Frederik Harsdorff and finished by C.F. Hansen. Work started in 1774, stalled for decades for lack of money, and was completed only in 1825.
Christian IX's Chapel. Built between 1919 and 1924 in a Byzantine Revival style, it caused a lively newspaper debate about whether it belonged on a medieval cathedral at all. It holds the tombs of the House of Glücksburg's early kings.
Frederik IX's burial site. The newest addition, opened in 1985, sits outside the church as a simple brick octagon. The king, a keen sailor, wished to rest in view of Roskilde Fjord.
The spires and the medieval exterior
The cathedral's most familiar silhouette dates from the seventeenth century. Christian IV, who did more than anyone to repair the church after the Reformation, gave it the two tall spires in 1633. He also donated a pulpit and a grand sandstone portal, and of course paid for his own chapel.
Walking around the outside, look at the brickwork itself. UNESCO notes that the bricks in the external walls vary in size and colour, which gives the long walls a warm, uneven texture you lose in photographs.
The cathedral sits on a small rise above Roskilde Fjord, and parts of the medieval street pattern survive around it. Major work on the roof and spires was carried out between 2006 and 2009.
Roskilde Cathedral on the UNESCO list
Roskilde Cathedral was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. Two reasons were given, and both are easy to see on a visit.
First, it is an outstanding early example of brick used for a major church in northern Europe. Second, its chapels and porches show the successive styles of European architecture in a single structure, from Romanesque and Gothic to Renaissance, neoclassical and twentieth-century work.
It is also simply a church in daily use. Services are held here, and it hosts concerts through the year, often featuring its historic organ, recreated by Marcussen & Søn in 1991 around pipework from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Planning a visit to Roskilde Cathedral in Denmark
Roskilde is an easy day trip from Copenhagen, and the cathedral is within easy walking distance of the railway station. Plan for at least an hour or two inside if you want to see all the chapels properly.
Because it is an active church, it can close to visitors for services, weddings, funerals and royal events. It is worth checking current opening hours and ticket prices on the cathedral's own website before you go rather than relying on older guides.
A few things are easy to miss. The upper floor of the Chapel of the Magi houses a small museum about the building's history, and St Bridget's Chapel on the north side is where the sarcophagus of Queen Margrethe II, designed by Bjørn Nørgaard, has already been installed.
If you are building a wider trip, our Denmark guide collects more buildings in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense. And for another great medieval cathedral of the North, read our piece on Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim.
Why the building rewards a slow look
It would be easy to treat Roskilde Cathedral as a royal tomb collection and move quickly from coffin to coffin. The more rewarding approach is to notice how each generation tried to leave its mark while still fitting into the medieval shell.
Some succeeded better than others, and Danes have argued about several of the additions. That ongoing conversation, carried out in brick, plaster, marble and iron, is exactly what makes the building one of the most fascinating churches in Scandinavia.