About Skálholt Cathedral

Skálholt became the episcopal see of all Iceland in 1056, when Ísleifur Gissurarson was ordained the country’s first bishop; a second Icelandic diocese was later established at Hólar in 1106. Iceland’s first formal school, Skálholtsskóli, was founded at Skálholt in the same year as the bishopric to educate clergy, and for the following eight centuries the site functioned as one of the two most important religious, political, and cultural centres in the country, hosting not only the bishop’s residence and cathedral but also a school, farming operations, a smithy, and, throughout the Catholic era, a monastery. A succession of large wooden cathedral churches, built with timber imported from Norway, stood on the site over the centuries — Bishop Klængur had the first major medieval church constructed in the mid-12th century, and churches of comparable scale, some considerably larger than the present building, continued to be rebuilt there through the 17th century. The Reformation reached its violent culmination at Skálholt on 7 November 1550, when Jón Arason, bishop of the northern see of Hólar and the last Catholic bishop in Iceland, was executed there together with his two sons; having resisted the Danish crown’s imposition of Lutheranism for over a decade after his fellow bishop Ögmundur had been deported in 1541, Arason and his sons were declared outlaws by Danish decree and beheaded without trial, an event that cemented Lutheranism’s dominance in Iceland for nearly four centuries. The diocese’s importance waned over the following centuries, hastened by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other 18th-century disasters, and the episcopal see and school were eventually transferred to Reykjavík; the Diocese of Skálholt itself was formally dissolved in 1801, later re-established as a suffragan diocese in 1909. Archaeological excavations ahead of the construction of the present cathedral uncovered a stone sarcophagus believed to hold the remains of Páll Jónsson, Bishop of Skálholt, who died in 1211 — one of nine successive churches known to have stood on the exact same site across the thousand years since the diocese’s founding. The current cathedral was built between 1956 and 1963 to mark the 900th anniversary of the diocese’s establishment, with its cornerstone laid in 1956 by Bishop Sigurbjörn Einarsson and its consecration completed in 1963.