Today's National Geographic Photo of the Day shows an Icelandic church almost swallowed by grass. Its walls are the ground itself.
Screenshot: National Geographic Photo of the Day | Photograph: Flip Twogood | Original page
A very small church stands in an open green landscape in southeastern Iceland. Its wooden gable is painted white and pierced by a few windows, but thick grass covers both side walls and the entire roof. These are not vines climbing a building. They are the meadow growing on the walls themselves. Mountains rise in the distance. Nearby, crosses emerge from the grass.
The church is Hofskirkja, the church at Hof.
National Geographic titled the photograph "One With the Earth." The phrase is more exact than it first appears. The church does not merely look as though it grew from the ground. Its building material was made by lifting the neighboring meadow, cutting it into blocks, and stacking them one by one.
Behind that method lies a story about scarcity.
First, Where Is It?
National Geographic's caption places the church at Fagurhólsmýri. That is not exactly wrong, but it needs explanation.
The church is actually at Hof, a farm settlement beside Iceland's Ring Road in the southeastern region of Öræfi. Fagurhólsmýri is another settlement more than ten kilometers away. The connection is postal: Hof's address is "785 Öræfi," and the postal district numbered 785 happens to be called Fagurhólsmýri.
In Iceland's empty country, an address and a place can be more than ten kilometers apart because one postal name must cover an entire wilderness.
According to the National Museum of Iceland, the present church was built between 1883 and 1885. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland gives 1883 to 1884, while National Geographic says 1884. All three versions have sources, so this article uses "the mid-1880s." The builder was Páll Pálsson, a carpenter from Hörgsdalur. The church measures 9.8 by 4.5 meters and seats 80. It remains the parish church of Öræfi and is still in use. It was transferred to the National Museum in the early 1950s and completely dismantled and reconstructed in 1953-1954.
Documents record a church on the site as early as 1343, dedicated to Saint Clement.
Hofskirkja is often called the last Icelandic church newly built by traditional turf methods. The qualification matters. Turf churches were later moved and rebuilt, including Árbæjarkirkja at Reykjavík's open-air museum, and a replica based on archaeological evidence was constructed around 2001. But as a genuinely new building made in the old way, the mid-1880s church at Hof was the last.
"One of Six" Needs a Correction
National Geographic's caption calls Hofskirkja "one of six constructed in this style."
Six is the number that survive, not the number that were built.
Iceland once had many turf churches. Six remain today, or five if the count is restricted to churches still on their original sites and more or less in their original form:
- Hofskirkja, Hof, Öræfi, mid-1880s
- Víðimýrarkirkja, Skagafjörður, 1834
- Grafarkirkja, Höfðaströnd, 17th century, described as the oldest
- Saurbæjarkirkja, Eyjafjörður, 1858, described as the largest
- Núpsstaðarkirkja, Núpsstaður, around 1660, described as the smallest and, in 1930, the first building taken over by Iceland's National Museum
- Árbæjarkirkja, at Reykjavík's open-air museum, originally the 1842 church at Silfrastaðir and moved and rebuilt in the 1950s
A formal response from Iceland's parliament on turf-building heritage is explicit: the National Museum's building collection contains nine turf farmhouses and five turf churches. The sixth church, Árbæjarkirkja, belongs to Reykjavík City Museum and was dismantled and rebuilt at a new site. Iceland's official tourism organization likewise says that only five turf churches remain standing more or less in their original form.
The accurate statement is that only six turf churches survive in all of Iceland.
Survived and built are different claims.
Why Icelanders Built with Turf
The short answer is a lack of wood.
The unsettling question is why the wood was gone.
According to Iceland's official forestry service, when people settled Iceland about 1,150 years ago, birch forest and woodland covered 25 to 40 percent of the island's land area.
By the middle of the 20th century, coverage had fallen below 1 percent, perhaps below 0.5 percent.
The forestry service's judgment is unambiguous: grazing that prevented trees from regenerating was the leading cause of forest loss. A cooling climate and volcanic activity "cannot explain the overall woodland decline," and natural disturbance "cannot explain the permanent destruction of 95% of the original forest cover."
Even the available wood was birch, not oak suitable for large beams. Timber also competed with two more urgent needs: making charcoal for ironworking and heating homes. Icelanders continued burning wood for heat into the 1940s.
Icelanders did not simply choose turf. They burned the trees, sheep grazed away the recovery, and people had to live in what remained.
In one millennium, an island went from 25 percent forest cover to less than 1 percent.
That is not the end of the account. By 2016, forest and woodland had recovered to 1,906 square kilometers, or 1.9 percent of Iceland: 1,506 square kilometers of native birch woodland and 400 square kilometers of planted forest. The country is putting the trees back one by one.
Thick Earth Does Not Stop Heat; It Delays It
National Geographic's caption says the earthen shell keeps the building naturally cool in summer and warm in winter.
That is broadly true, but the mechanism is buffering, not insulation. The difference matters.
Heavy earth walls possess high thermal mass. They do not make heat and cannot prevent heat from passing through. They make its passage very slow.
Sunlight striking the outside wall at noon may not deliver that heat indoors until midnight. By then the air outside has cooled.
Measurements from China illustrate the effect. A 2024 study of cave dwellings in a northern cold region recorded outdoor temperatures from a high of 22.1 C to a low of -10.5 C, a swing of 32.6 degrees. In the main room of a cave dwelling, temperatures moved only between 7.7 C and 21.1 C, a range of 13.4 degrees.
The thick earth wall compressed the outdoor temperature swing by more than half.
The same data give the other side of the result: after compression, the average was only about 13 C.
For a person, that is still cold.
"Cool in summer" is true. "Warm in winter" is relative. Thirteen degrees indoors is warm compared with ten below zero outside, but it is not comfort. It is survival.
A separate winter field study of sunken cave dwellings in the Guanzhong region was more direct. The average Predicted Mean Vote was -2.01, and more than 67 percent of occupants were dissatisfied. The paper concluded that winter thermal protection was poor and indoor thermal comfort low, requiring urgent improvement.
Icelandic historical accounts point in the same direction. A British traveler wrote in an early 19th-century travelogue about Iceland that "there is no means of ventilation in any part of the house." Contemporary accounts also describe perpetually damp and dirty earth floors; 20 or more people sometimes eating and sleeping in one room; and the intense mixed smell of fish, oil bags, and hides.
In the coldest weather, people brought sheep into the lower story so the animals' body heat would warm the rooms above.
The widely circulated image of sheep grazing on Icelandic turf roofs could not be supported by a reliable Icelandic source. It comes mainly from Norwegian and Faroese tourist imagery. Icelandic historical evidence puts the sheep inside the house, not on the roof.
The Anatomy of a Turf Block
Turf was not simply sliced at random and piled into walls. It was a specialized craft with a specialized vocabulary.
The terminology below comes from a World Heritage nomination text submitted by the National Museum of Iceland and included by UNESCO, and from a craft booklet published by an Icelandic regional museum.
The principal block, klömbruhnaus, was cut with a spade into an angled wedge roughly 60 centimeters long, 20 centimeters high, and 30 centimeters wide, triangular when seen from above. The thick end was the hnakki, the "back of the neck." The narrow end was the sporður, the "fish tail." Builders laid the blocks with necks outward and tails inward, tier by tier in a herringbone pattern.
Icelanders named a piece of earth with a body part and part of a fish.
The strengur was different: a thin strip roughly one meter long and no more than 5 to 10 centimeters thick. It did not carry loads. Laid lengthwise between courses of wedge blocks, it tied the entire wall together like a bonding course.
The material test in the craft booklet is one sentence:
"The more roots, the better the turf."
Roots are natural reinforcement. Earth is the aggregate; grass roots are the rebar.
Another construction detail is unexpectedly sophisticated. Builders placed at least one or two courses of stone beneath the wall to interrupt the capillary rise of moisture.
That was a ninth-century damp-proof course. Traditional Chinese earthen buildings use a stone base for the same purpose.
Icelandic roofs are especially revealing. Norwegian turf roofs rely on multiple layers of birch bark for waterproofing, with turf acting as weight to hold the bark down. Iceland lacked even enough birch bark. Its builders roofed with diamond-shaped blocks called snidda, relying on the pieces to grow together and become watertight. The craft booklet says this kind of roof "grows together quickly and is durable."
The roof has to be alive in order to keep out water. Its grass is not ornament. Roots stitch the roofing into a continuous mat.
The weight makes the structure tangible. A Nordic turf roof weighs roughly 250 kilograms per square meter, rising to 400 or 500 kilograms per square meter under winter snow. It is a small grassland resting on a timber frame.
Thirty Years
In 2024, the University of Iceland began the first systematic investigation of turf-building conservation with building-engineering methods, including moisture and temperature monitoring and 3D scans to track movement in timber frames. Its estimate was stark:
An unattended turf house will collapse in roughly 30 years.
Historically, occupants dealt with that fact by rebuilding some part of the house almost every year.
The failure sequence is clear in the craft booklet. Turf walls kept wet for long periods first become overgrown, then rot, settle, and collapse.
Thirty years is approximately one generation.
In Iceland, a house was not something that had been built. It was something continually being built. Once the work stopped, the house began returning to meadow.
That return is happening now. The parliamentary document gives cold figures from Skagafjordur: among 37 turf houses tracked from 1989 to 2021, 62 percent had disappeared or become ruins, 5 percent had partly collapsed, and only 33 percent still stood. The document concluded that without action, most of the buildings standing today would collapse or disappear within years or decades.
Money is not the only problem. The same document says that very few people possess sufficient skill.
Iceland has listed the turf-building crafts of stunga (cutting in), rista (cutting the underside), and hleðsla (laying) in its national inventory of intangible cultural heritage. The inventory states the present condition bluntly:
No one now practices the craft full time.
Its justification for listing is equally direct:
What was once taken for granted is now rare and disappearing.
A Place Renamed "Wilderness"
Before 1362, the land beneath the church was not called Öræfi. It was Litla-Hérað, meaning "Little District." According to a report by the Icelandic Meteorological Office, this glacier-ringed lowland was fertile grazing country supporting at least 40 farms.
Then Öræfajökull erupted.
It was a VEI 6 explosive eruption, the largest in Europe since Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii in 79 CE. An estimated 10 cubic kilometers of tephra fell. Ash buried homes and villages beneath deposits more than 40 centimeters thick, while the plume traveled as far as western Europe.
At the same time came a glacial outburst flood, or jökulhlaup, with a peak discharge greater than 100,000 cubic meters per second. A contemporary account said the flood carried rocks, gravel, and mud into the sea and filled water 30 fathoms, about 55 meters, deep with a sand plain.
One flood turned 55-meter-deep sea into land.
Little District was destroyed. An Icelandic Meteorological Office account estimates that about 300 people died in pyroclastic flows and floods, although medieval Iceland had no reliable census and the figure is necessarily an estimate.
The survivors then renamed the place.
Litla-Hérað, Little District, became Öræfi: wilderness, a place without roads.
The glacier itself was renamed. Before the eruption it had been Knappafellsjökull. Afterward it became Öræfajökull.
The place-name is a gravestone.
The volcano erupted again on August 4, 1727, in a smaller event of about VEI 4. Its glacial flood peaked near 40,000 cubic meters per second within three to five hours, killing three people and sweeping away grazing sheep, cattle, and horses.
Öræfajökull is Iceland's largest active volcano. Its summit caldera measures 3 by 4 kilometers, and the volcano itself is about 20 kilometers across. Iceland's highest peak, Hvannadalshnúkur, at 2,110 meters, stands on it. The volcano now lies within Vatnajökull National Park, one of Iceland's three inscribed World Heritage properties. It was listed in 2019; the other two are Þingvellir National Park and Surtsey.
The turf church of the 1880s was built again in the place renamed wilderness. In physical terms, it stands on a layer of ash from 1362.
One more number conveys the isolation. In 1974, completion of a 904-meter bridge across the Skeiðará, still Iceland's longest, finally closed the last gap in the Ring Road. Before then, glacial rivers cut Öræfi off from both sides.
After the church was completed in the 1880s, it remained isolated for another 90 years.
Crosses Rising from the Grass
The photographer mentioned "crosses in the ground."
They are not memorial markers without graves. According to the National Museum of Iceland, "the cemetery around the church has raised burial mounds in the old tradition."
Each grave is a mound covered entirely in grass, with only the cross exposed.
Every cross emerging from the meadow marks a person beneath it.
The church and the dead around it share the same covering.
Its Heritage Status, Precisely
Iceland's Turf House Tradition was submitted to UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List on February 7, 2011, as entry 5589, by the National Museum of Iceland.
It has not been inscribed on the World Heritage List. A tentative listing and an inscription are not the same thing.
The submission nevertheless explains the tradition's singularity. Turf houses existed elsewhere in northern Europe, but they were generally houses for the poor. Only in Iceland was turf used for "all classes and all types of houses": homes, stables, churches, and chieftains' halls.
Here, chieftains and God lived in turf houses too.
The proposed serial property has 14 component sites. Hofskirkja is one of them.
In a Century, Evidence of Poverty Became a Heritage Candidate
Before 1910, most Icelanders lived in turf houses. By the 1930s, stone and concrete had comprehensively replaced them. By 1960, almost no one still lived in a traditional turf house.
Local reporting says Icelanders discarded the houses eagerly as soon as they had an alternative. Iceland Review put the criticism more harshly, writing that the country had managed to destroy its turf houses effortlessly and without commotion.
In 50 years, a building tradition that had lasted a millennium disappeared.
The photograph must hold two ideas at once. Today the church belongs to a World Heritage candidate; a century ago it was evidence of poverty. The same building means the opposite in two different eras.
It is dishonest to romanticize a life that its occupants worked desperately to escape. It is equally dishonest to deny the extraordinary knowledge within it. Both statements have to remain true.
China Also Built with Unlikely Materials at Hand
Icelanders lifted meadow to build houses. On the Shandong Peninsula, people hauled seagrass from the water to roof them.
Rongcheng seagrass houses use eelgrass that grows in shallow water 5 to 10 meters deep and is locally called daye haitai. Why does it resist rot? It contains abundant salts and gelatinous compounds, protecting it from insects and mildew and making it difficult to ignite.
This was not mere improvisation. It was material science discovered in place.
Sources vary, but official media commonly describe a 50-degree gable roof, with seagrass several meters thick at its deepest point. An official figure of 4 meters likely represents the extreme at the ridge. One house often requires more than 5,000 kilograms of seagrass. Construction involves more than 70 stages and takes three or four craftspeople more than ten days.
Claims about lifespan are inconsistent. Promotional accounts promise "a hundred years without failure." Other sources give durability of 50 years, and still others say dried seagrass may last more than a decade.
The disagreement demonstrates the same fact as the Icelandic turf house: this is a building that must be repeatedly rethatched. A century belongs not to one layer of grass, but to the survival of the craft.
Rongcheng's current protection rules make that logic concrete. Repairs to seagrass houses must be reported to the village committee in advance. A specialist thatcher must be hired from the local register of traditional craftspeople. Materials must match the original conditions, and all work must be done by hand.
The principle is the same as the National Museum of Iceland retaining its few turf builders: preserve the skill in order to preserve the building.
A common error needs correction. Seagrass-house building entered Shandong's provincial intangible cultural heritage list in 2006; it is not on the national list. China's cave-dwelling construction craft is national heritage. It entered the expanded third batch of the national list in 2011 as VIII-180, including the sunken-courtyard construction craft and northern Shaanxi cave-dwelling construction craft, nominated by Shan County in Henan and Baota District in Yan'an, Shaanxi.
Modern earthen construction in China offers one more fact. A Chinese project won bronze in the 2019 World Habitat Awards. The Wu Zhi Qiao Charitable Foundation began promoting modern earthen construction in Macha village, Gansu, in 2011, building 32 prototype homes and a community center. A team led by Mu Jun developed modern rammed-earth technology, design methods, and construction machinery suited to rural China. Seismic research verified that the new houses could meet intensity-8 fortification requirements. The program subsequently completed 200 earthen buildings across several provinces.
Its central method was training local craftspeople so they could earn a living with the skill.
That and Iceland's school for traditional turf-building crafts express the same principle in two ways.
The Last Word
Little public information is available about photographer Flip Twogood beyond his social media accounts and the sentence National Geographic quotes:
"They all have a very unique beauty, and this one was particularly stunning, with the grass covering the roof and the crosses coming out of the ground."
That is about all that can be established.
The church has stood for roughly 140 years on volcanic ash in a place called wilderness. Its walls must periodically be laid again. The grass on its roof must live to keep out water. Every raised patch of grass around it covers a person.
It is not a building that was completed. It is an act that must be kept going.
Stop the work, and it begins to return to the meadow.
Image: National Geographic Photo of the Day | Photograph by Flip Twogood, Nat Geo Image Collection | Original page.
Sources
National Museum of Iceland (Þjóðminjasafn Íslands); the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland (Þjóðkirkjan); Icelandic Forest Service (Skógræktin); Icelandic Meteorological Office (Veðurstofa Íslands), Öræfajökull hazard assessment; Icelandic Parliament, 157th session, document 1364; University of Iceland; Iceland's Living Traditions intangible cultural heritage platform; Byggðasafn Skagfirðinga, Torf til bygginga; UNESCO World Heritage Centre; Visit Akureyri; Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology; Buildings (2024 and 2025); JSTOR Daily; Iceland Review; China's National Development and Reform Commission; China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network; and World Habitat Awards.