Watch: Emotional moment Swedish town comes together to roll wooden church 5km to save it from destruction
Residents of a Swedish town have joined forces to save a historic wooden church which was in danger of being swallowed by a mine. from destruction, with locals rolling the structure 5km to avoid it being swallowed by a mine.
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The project - which involves rolling the church 5km - has taken around eight years of planning and cost around 500m kronor (£39m).
Thousands of people have travelled to Sweden's northernmost city Kiruna, above the Arctic Circle, to watch the unique operation, which is expected to take two days.
The journey began with a blessing from the church's vicar, Lena Tjärnberg, and Bishop Åsa Nyström of the Diocese of Luleå.
The wooden church was closed a year ago to prepare for the relocation as the world’s largest underground iron ore mine, which is operated by the state-owned mining company LKAB, threatened to destroy the town.
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As the mine expanded deeper underground, residents began seeing cracks in several structures and roads - leading to more than 20 buildings moving to a new city downtown, from 2004 onwards.
Around 16 more buildings remain, including the church, and need to be moved to their new location.
The church, however, which is about 40 metres wide and weighs 672 tonnes, proved to be a lot trickier to uproot - so engineers have widened a major road and dismantled a viaduct to increase the operation's likelihood of success.
A driver, using a large control box, will pilot the church along the route at a pace of up to 1.5 kilometres an hour.
There will be a pause each day for Fika, the Swedish afternoon coffee break.
Performances from Sweden's Eurovision entry KAJ and a visit from the Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf are also planned during the moving of Kiruna Church.
The church is expected to reopen at its new location at the end of next year, but the city’s entire relocation is not expected to be completed until 2035.
The operation was tested successfully on a 30-metre stretch over the weekend.
"When it came to the church, we decided it was best to move it in one piece. We saw the value in that," the LKAB project manager, Stefan Holmblad Johansson, told AFP.
"It is with great reverence we have undertaken this project. This is not just any building, it’s a church."
Kiruna Church, which was built in 1912, was voted the "best building of all time" in 2001 by the Swedish people.
It was designed to emulate the style of the Sami people, an indigenous group inhabiting parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia.
About 23,000 people live in Kiruna, many of which are Sami.
The expansion has attracted criticism, including from some Sami people who worry fragmentation of the land will make reindeer herding more difficult.