Tromsø Cathedral or Arctic?

Two churches, two shores

Tromsø's old centre sits on Tromsøya, an island in the Tromsøysundet strait. The city's cathedral stands in a park there, in the middle of the city. Across the strait, in the Tromsdalen valley on the mainland, stands the church that visitors know as the Arctic Cathedral. The Tromsø Bridge joins the two shores. It is the main reason people confuse the churches: both feature in photographs of the city, and both hold concerts, but you reach them from opposite sides of the water.

Tromsø Cathedral: yellow and wooden

Tromsø Cathedral was designed by Christian Heinrich Grosch in the Gothic Revival style and completed in 1861. It is built of timber, clad in boards and painted yellow. It is the cathedral of the Diocese of Nord-Hålogaland and the seat of the Tromsø deanery, which is what makes it a cathedral in the formal sense. Visit Tromsø bills it as Northern Europe's largest wooden cathedral. This is the church named on the Midnight Concert ticket.

Read next: The wooden cathedral of Tromsø

The Arctic Cathedral: white and modern

The Arctic Cathedral is formally Tromsdalen Church, the parish church of Tromsøysund. The architect was Jan Inge Hovig, and it was consecrated in 1965. It is a modernist church made mainly of aluminium-coated concrete panels, and its shape is believed to echo the twin-peaked island of Håja. A glass mosaic, added in 1972 and called The Return of Christ, fills the eastern side. It seats about 600, and it publishes its own concert calendar on its website, separate from the Midnight Concert.

The bridge in between

The Tromsø Bridge opened in 1960 and is 1,036 metres long. It replaced a ferry connection and was the first cantilever bridge built in Norway. The Arctic Cathedral and the mountain Tromsdalstinden form a composition with the bridge, which is the view in many photographs of the city. It is also the clearest test of which church you are heading for: if your route to the concert takes you over the bridge, you are going to the Arctic Cathedral.

Why the names get mixed up

The Arctic Cathedral is not a cathedral in the church-law sense. The formal cathedral is the yellow one, the seat of the Diocese of Nord-Hålogaland. But the nickname is so widely used, and the white church is so striking, that visitors search for the Arctic Cathedral and can end up booking a concert in it. Whatever you search for, trust the church and address on your confirmation, which for this ticket is Tromsø Cathedral at Kirkegata 7.

Which to choose for a concert

They suit different evenings. The Midnight Concert is a short concert in a wooden church in the city centre, with folk tunes, psalms and Sámi music. The Arctic Cathedral lists its own concerts on its own site, and its programme is its own. If you can only attend one, choose by what you want to hear and where you are staying, then confirm the church on the ticket. Neither one replaces the other.

Read next: Tromsø midnight concert tickets

Seeing the other church anyway

You can still see both churches in a short stay. The cathedral is in the city centre, so it is easy to include on a walk. The Arctic Cathedral is across the bridge, which means a separate trip over the strait. Because the concert ticket is tied to one building only, keep the concert in the yellow church for the evening you book, and treat the white church as another stop.

Who this isn't for

If you have booked a concert at the Arctic Cathedral, this site is not where to book it, and this ticket will not admit you there. A visitor who only wants to look at the white church from the street needs no concert ticket at all. And if you are comparing the two buildings as architecture, this ticket gives you the yellow one: a nineteenth-century wooden church, not a modernist one.