Holmen Church

A forge before it was a church

Most churches begin as churches. This one began as industrial plant: an anchor forge put up in 1562–63 under Frederik II, serving the navy's yard. Christian IV, who was responsible for a remarkable amount of what visitors now photograph in this city, turned it over to worship, and it was consecrated on 5 September 1619. The cruciform extension followed in 1641.

Who is buried in it

Niels Juel and Peter Tordenskjold, the two names Danish naval history is built around. A church that started as a place for making anchors ended as the place where the men who used them were buried, which is a neater arc than history usually manages. Holmen was the navy's own ground, so the congregation was drawn from the yard and the fleet rather than from a parish, and the building was extended to its cruciform plan in 1641 as that congregation grew.

What it came through

Everything. The church was already more than a century old when the fire of October 1728 took 47% of the medieval core, it survived the fire of 5 June 1795, and it stood while the Royal Navy fired 300 Congreve rockets into the city in September 1807 and burned the cathedral. Few buildings in central Copenhagen can say that, which is the quiet reason to stop at it. See the bombardment of 1807.

Christian IV's Copenhagen

The same king laid out Nytorv in 1610, put the Caritas Well on Gammeltorv in 1608, completed the Round Tower in 1642, began Kastellet in 1626 as St. Anne's Redoubt, and put the permanent execution scaffold on Nytorv from 1627. His reign gave Copenhagen both its handsomest squares and its machinery of public death, and the guided ghost walk starts on one of them. See the Nytorv page, the Round Tower and Kastellet.

The English walk runs an hour and a half from Nytorv to Kongens Nytorv: the guided ghost walk.

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