Captured by John Young Wall Street Journal, August 27, 1996, p. A10. Church Arson in Norway: The Devil Made Them Do It By Christian Caryl Oslo: Norway's historic stave churches inspire visitors to compare them to pagodas, pine trees, or Viking ships. The church in the central Norwegian village of Lom stands on a sandy bluff between a mountain and a wild glacial river, a harmonious hubbub of pointed gables and shingled planes and long-nosed dragons. The wooden structure, held together by sophisticated mortise-and-tenon joints that allow it to adapt to changing winds and temperatures, has survived 800 years without the help of glue or nails. To secular architects, this shrine is a triumph of their ancient aspiration to create buildings in perfect concord with their setting. The pious see it as a magnificent cipher of the divine. But there is trouble in this sacred precinct. The church's thick wooden beams lately conceal smoke detectors and sprinkler pipes, and the eaves of the low slate wall around the site shelter closed- circuit video cameras spying on everything that moves. Inside, a tour guide is admonishing a group of awe-struck visitors to appreciate the beauty while they still can. Just a few years earlier, he informs them, a similar church outside the western Norwegian city of Bergen was burned to the ground. The remaining 29 stave churches are under threat. "Kill the Christians. Burn their churches. Destroy their homes. Torture their children." So far the authors of this proclamation, now circulating in Norway's homegrown Satanist movement, have made good on at least one of their threats. During the past four years more than 20 historic wooden churches have been destroyed in arson attacks, with several stave churches narrowly escaping attempts. Almost all the attacks have been attributed to the Satanists, a small but virulent group of disaffected youths engaged in revolt against a staid Norwegian society. Nowadays the Norwegian Lutheran Church is a state institution, a highly visible component of the national political establishment, making it an especially attractive target for anarchic violence. Police impute the destruction of the Bergen church to Varg "the Count" Vikernes, a 23-year-old now serving a 21-year prison sentence for murdering a rival Satanist leader in 1992 and for his involvement in at least four other cases of church arson. Several sympathizers, many of them linked with the gothic Norwegian rock music scene known as "Black Metal," are awaiting trial for similar crimes. Normal Norwegians probably wouldn't have spent much time worrying about this lunatic fringe if it hadn't found a demonically effective way of getting attention. "Stave churches are one of the main treasures of our country," says Seppo Heinonen, representative of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments, an Oslo-based private conservation group that today owns and manages eight of the remaining 29. "When Norwegians talk about Norway, they talk about nature, mountains, fjords and stave churches. " These churches narrate history with a vividness that few other existing monuments can match. Norway was one of the last Western countries to undergo Christianization, and the stave churches, fusing pagan animal imagery and woodworking techniques with the symbols of the new system of belief, are virtually the only artifacts that still bear testimony to the process. "It's not only the building and what's inside it," adds Jan Tidemansen of the Norwegian Heritage Foundation in Vagamo, who notes that many of the medieval churches still serve congregations today. "It's also the relation between it and the people who use it. They've lived through grief and sorrow and happiness in their church through the centuries." And the Norwegians' emotional attachment to their churches is not limited, of course, to the oldest structures. When the Holmenkollen Chapel, a 19th-century wooden church often attended by the country's royal family, fell victim to arson four years ago, the act triggered an outpouring of spontaneous anguish and media hysteria. Such appreciation of the local architectural legacy wasn't always self- evident. Over the centuries, thousands of the churches have been destroyed by accidental fires, neglect, or modernization. Only in the 19th century, spurred by the Romantic enthusiasm for national folk cultures, did Norwegian conservationists begin to place stave churches under special protection. One, at Urnes, is on the Unesco list of historic monuments. But certainly few of the protectors ever reckoned with the determined onslaughts of 1990s anomie. Just a few miles down the road from Lom, the village of Vaga boasts its own beautiful church, filled with striking polychrome carvings and surrounded by grave markers crafted from local stone. First mentioned in 12th-century chronicles, the church was almost completely rebuilt in 1627 by Werner Olsen, a famous architect of the time. His design incorporated a few fragments of the original building, which experts say was probably one of the oldest in the country. Because of its composite quality and its structural peculiarities, there is some debate among architectural historians in Scandinavia whether the Vaga church qualifies as an "official" stave church, most of which were built between 1100 and 1400. The ambiguity has bureaucratic ramifications that have affected preservation efforts. There are no video cameras here. Security systems are limited to a few rudimentary smoke detectors and a copper lightning rod. Volunteers from the congregation keep watch during periods of maximum threat (such as Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, a day that Satanists have repeatedly singled out as especially appropriate for attacks). Recent treatment with wood tar to protect it from weathering has turned the building almost black and also increased its flammability. (Tar poses a serious fire risk for all wooden churches.) Arsonists would need little more than a cigarette lighter, a gallon of gasoline and a few minutes of surprise. "Time is a problem when a fire is set," says Leif Hagen, caretaker of the church, "because the building is like a torch. Without a sprinkler installed in the ceiling there's very little chance of saving it." The government is doing what it can to help protect historic wooden churches. Egil Kvarud, a preservationist at the National Directorate for Cultural Heritage ticks off the measures in a multimilliondollar program. The congregations of all churches built before 1800 have been offered special funds for the purchase of fire hydrants and hoses. And according to plan every stave church built before 1537, the year the Reformation came to Norway, will have its own high-tech security system by the end of this year. But Vaga, Mr. Kvarud says apologetically, doesn't qualify for the security system. Preservationists, predictably, criticize the government program for bureaucratic procedures and institutional short-sightedness. Others say that local authorities aren't bearing their own share of the responsibility for protecting local architectural treasures. Luckily other organizations are beginning to close the gap. The New York-based World Monuments Watch recently added the Vaga church to its list of "100 Most Endangered Sites," and the resulting publicity soon led to a grant of 100,000 Norwegian kroner (about $16,000) from the Samuel Kress Foundation -- money that preservationists hope will goad others to give. Vaga and the other artifacts of a unique architectural legacy will need all the help they can get, for technology is not only on the side of the protectors. Lately the Satanists have taken to the Internet to extol the virtues of a return to paganism, gracing their homepages (including http://www.optera.com/~gothmog/varg.html) with slick images of burning churches and imprisoned arsonists in Viking regalia. Sprinklers, unfortunately, aren't much help in quenching incendiary words and pictures. [Photo] The stave church in Lom [End] To see b/w pix: http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/stave.jpg