Christiansfeld

Christiansfeld was founded in 1773 by the Moravian Church on land granted by the Danish king, and the whole town is the point: a rational grid of yellow brick houses with red tile roofs, built to a shared standard because the congregation believed everyone should live alike. The church hall is white, bare and windowed on all sides, with no altar and no images, and men and women once entered by separate doors. Behind the town lies God's Acre, the burial ground, where the stones lie flat and identical in rows sorted by sex and age rather than wealth. It was inscribed by UNESCO in 2015.

History

The Moravian Church founded the town in 1773 and named it after King Christian VII, who offered a ten-year tax holiday and paid 10 percent of the cost of new houses; most of it was built between 1773 and 1800 to a strict plan inspired by the Moravian settlements of Herrnhaag and Gnadau, and by 1782 it had about 400 residents. After Denmark's defeat in 1864 Christiansfeld, with the rest of Schleswig, passed to Prussia, and it returned to Denmark after the plebiscite of 1920, when the church lost the right to choose the town's leaders and sold its schools. A restoration of the town centre agreed in 2009 was followed in 2012 by a donation for the Sisters' House, and since July 2015 the town has been a World Heritage Site as the best-preserved example of Moravian town planning and architecture (Wikipedia, Christiansfeld).

What to look for

• The church hall - the plain white meeting room with no altar and daylight on all sides.
• The Sisters' House and Brothers' House - the large communal buildings on the main square.
• God's Acre - the burial ground of identical flat stones in ordered rows.
• Honey cakes - the spiced cakes the town has baked since the eighteenth century.

When to go

May to September, when the museum and the guided tours run and the gardens are in order. The church hall keeps limited hours and can be closed for services, so check before you plan a route around it. Out of season the town is still walkable but almost everything indoors is shut.

Good to know

This is a quiet residential town of a few thousand people, not an attraction, and there is little to do beyond walking, reading the boards and buying cake. Without a guide the uniform yellow houses can look like nothing much. Two hours is enough for most people. Sunday mornings belong to the congregation.

Nearby

Koldinghus is twenty minutes north; Haderslev and its cathedral lie to the south.

Key facts