From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 
 
 Kiruna Church (Swedish: Kiruna kyrka) is a church building in Kiruna, Sweden, and is one of Sweden's largest wooden buildings. The church exterior is built in a Gothic Revival style, while the altar is in Art Nouveau. 
 
 In 2001, Kiruna Church was voted the most popular pre-1950 building in Sweden, in a country-wide poll conducted by the Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, a government agency connected to the Ministry of Culture.[1][2]It is considered to be "the Shrine of the Nomadic people."[3] 
 
 History [ edit ] 
 
 The church was built between 1909–1912, and consecrated by Bishop Olof Bergqvist on 8 December 1912.[4] Since 1913, the church is included in the Jukkasjärvi parish in the diocese of Luleå.[5] Gustaf Wickman was the church's architect and the famous altarpiece is a work of Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke.[6][5] 
 
 Interior of the church. 
 
 References [ edit ] 
 
 Media related to Kiruna Church at Wikimedia Commons ||||| The northernmost city in Sweden, Kiruna, was back in the news this week with reports that it would be moving — yes, moving — about two miles east. And, for once, an unusual story from the Arctic Circle had nothing to do with climate change. 
 
 Why would a town need to move? 
 
 Kiruna’s plan to move has been in the works for a few years now. The city, comfortably within the borders of the Arctic Circle and home to a little more than 18,000 people, is built on a hill above a vast iron ore mine. Founded in 1900 and midwifed by a state-owned mining company, Kiruna has been an industry town for over a century. 
 
 Now that industry is simultaneously endangering the city and paying for its relocation. As the mine on Kiruna’s western border has expanded deeper into the ground, ore is being removed from beneath the city’s foundations — literally undermining the ground it sits on. ||||| More than 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle lies the city of Kiruna, Sweden, a charming community of roughly 18,000 that provides 90% of all the iron sold in the European Union. 
 
 The city is booming and beloved by its residents, but there's just one problem: Kiruna is sinking into the earth. 
 
 The city's iron mines are located almost directly below its current center, and decades of heavy mining have loosened the city's foundations, deforming the ground in the area. If the city wants to keep extracting iron, it must go dangerously deep into the Earth, possibly risking total collapse of homes and buildings. 
 
 Kiruna's solution: Pick up the entire city and relocate it, nearly two miles away from the mines. 
 
 Relocating an entire city, of course, is highly complicated and difficult — not to mention costly. But LKAB, the state-owned company responsible for the mine, is footing the entire bill until the year 2033. In 2010, LKAB had already spent $2.4 billion on the move and announced plans to sink another $3.8 billion in the following years. 
 
 The total cost of relocating the city is still anyone's guess, however, since the move will last the rest of the century. LKAB predicts its rich supply of iron ore will finance the project, keeping it afloat for decades to come. 
 
 The architecture firm behind the move, White, plans to migrate the city center over the next five years, concluding sometime between 2019 and 2021. Relocating the entirety of Kiruna will take much longer. According to White's timeline, the town will slowly move eastward, neighborhood by neighborhood, relocating the majority of its buildings and population within 30 years. But the master plan, which includes turning Kiruna into a more sustainable, walkable city with a diversified economy, is expected to be compete sometime around 2100. 
 
 In the short term, White has been tasked with moving many of Kiruna's most prized structures. Some, particularly the buildings that have been in the city for decades, will be plucked from their foundations and driven or airlifted to the new city center. 
 
 One of those buildings is the town church, which opened in 1912 and was voted the most beautiful building in Sweden in 2001 by Swedish residents. Others include Kiruna's city hall and a local store, called Centrum, which has been family-run since 1933. 
 
 "They are going to move the city and we will follow along," Johanna Sevä, the store's co-owner, explains in a new short film about Kiruna. "We are going to move with the store." 
 
 Not all buildings will be relocated, however. LKAB plans to pay residents of homes or apartments that aren't getting moved 25% more than market value to cover the cost of a new house. Residents can also opt to swap their old home for a new one, which is what Johanna Sevä did in 2013. The homes that are left behind will get demolished. 
 
 Officials from LKAB first noticed the damage caused by mining in 2003 when miners sought to expand their digging to penetrate deeper iron stores. By the next year, the town had already decided to move. 
 
 Mark Szulgit, one of the architects involved with the project, says that successfully moving the city's most iconic pieces of history will be the key to preserving Kiruna's identity. 
 
 "Our biggest challenge is not the design of a new city, which is sustainable and attractive and modern," Szulgit says in the film. "The biggest challenge is to move the minds of the people, and to move the culture."
– What do you do when a city is sinking? Why, you move it, of course. That's what the Swedish city of Kiruna has decided because iron mining below it has weakened the foundations of houses and buildings, Tech Insider reports. Now LKAB, the state-owned company behind the mining, is dedicating billions of dollars to moving Kiruna about 2 miles east. The ongoing 30-year plan includes relocating 21 particular buildings (like Kiruna's city hall and its attractive church) and paying residents to have their homes demolished and rebuilt at the new location, the Guardian reported last year. An Arctic city that's in darkness most of the year, Kiruna "will be a bit like a walking millipede with a thousand feet, moving, crawling, slowly ... toward the east," says an architect in a promotional video for the plan. Critics say social networks will be shattered by the move and relocated residents will have higher rents, but on the bright side, the new city is supposed to be more walkable and economically diverse. Plus there's a lot at stake: Founded partly by LKAB in 1900, the city of 18,000 supplies the European Union with 90% of its iron. "There might be some concerns, but the mine has to keep operating," a resident says. It's not a first, either: Cities have been relocated before for economic or safety reasons, and other towns are considering moves over climate change, the New York Times notes. Only possible problem for Kiruna? "Iron is under the new town center, too," admits a city official. "[But] it will be too expensive for LKAB to move the city again." (In another mining story, Apple and Microsoft are said to use cobalt mined by kids.)