Háteigskirkja Church

The parish was founded by law in 1952, and the congregation had an organist and a choir before it had a building. Halldór H. Jónsson drew the church and wanted it beautiful, warm and solemn. Work began in September 1957, and Bishop Sigurbjörn Einarsson consecrated it during Advent in 1965 with a good deal still unfinished. It is a basilica, a long hall with colonnades down each side, and it carries four slender spires. The pointed windows and doors and the gilded columns inside give it an eastern cast unusual in an Icelandic church, which the church traces to Halldór's visit to the Alhambra in Granada. The chancel holds a mosaic of forty square metres by Benedikt Gunnarsson, The Cross and the Light of the Holy Trinity, made in Munich from his drawings and given to the church during Advent in 1988. Karl Schuke of Berlin built the organ in 1973, twelve years before the same workshop delivered the organ in Dómkirkjan. Kordía, the church's chamber choir of twenty voices, sings the services and gives two or three concerts a year.