Roskilde Cathedral
— — Denmark's kings, kept under one roof.
Not only on a wall.
“The brick cathedral on the hill above Roskilde Fjord, thirty kilometres west of Copenhagen. Begun in the 1170s, finished around 1280, and used as the burial church of Denmark's monarchs since the fifteenth century. Forty kings and queens lie inside it now, each in their own chapel, each in their own style. UNESCO listed it in 1995. The town below is quiet and walkable.
Roskilde Cathedral, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Roskilde Cathedral stands on a low rise above Roskilde Fjord, about thirty kilometres west of Copenhagen on the Danish island of Zealand. Construction began in the 1170s under Bishop Absalon, replacing an earlier wooden church, and was substantially complete by around 1280. It is one of the earliest brick Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe and the model for the spread of the style across the Baltic. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1995. The cathedral remains the seat of the Lutheran Diocese of Roskilde within the Church of Denmark.
The cathedral is built of red brick, about three million bricks in the main fabric, set on a low plinth of carved Zealand granite. The original Romanesque plan gave way during construction to the new French Gothic vocabulary arriving in the 1190s, so the building reads as the transition itself: round arches at the base of the choir, pointed arches above. Centuries of additions accreted along the flanks: the Chapel of the Magi in the 1460s, the Chapel of Christian IV in the early 1640s, and the modern Chapel of Frederik IX, completed 1985.
The cathedral has been the principal burial church of the Danish monarchy since Queen Margrete I was interred here in 1413, and now holds the tombs of about forty kings and queens. Each reign has added its own chapel or sarcophagus, so the building is a walk through Danish art across six centuries: Late-Gothic alabaster for Margrete, Renaissance and Baroque marble through the seventeenth century, neoclassical for Frederik V, and a stripped-back modernist chapel for Frederik IX, who died in 1972. A burial chapel for Queen Margrethe II was prepared during her reign.