Langholt Church

Langholtssöfnuður was formed in 1952 with no church and, by its own minutes, no money to pay an organist. It built its parish hall first, the first the Icelandic church had built, and held services there for twenty-two years until Hörður Bjarnason's church was consecrated beside it in September 1984. The room is plain and steep-sided, and the parish says of it that many find it cold until music fills it. The acoustic is warm and generous, near that of a good concert hall while keeping a church's reverberation, and the Noack organ of 1999 was built to a north German Baroque design. Jón Stefánsson took the organ bench in 1964, aged seventeen, and held it until he died in 2016. The choirs that grew up around him sing here still.