Sidensjö, Örnsköldsvik

The Church Built in the Plague Year

Sidensjö church is one of the oldest stone churches in Ångermanland, and the parish has an explanation for why the work stopped. The Black Death came, the story goes, and took the builders — so many that the stone lay where it had been dropped and the walls waited for a generation that could finish them. The dating is disputed, as such things are. But the legend has been told in the parish for centuries and it carries something the documents do not: the memory of a year when the labour simply ceased, and everyone knew why.