Denmark's first concert church stands in the middle of Blagards Plads, the sunken granite square at the heart of Norrebro. KoncertKirken opened in October 2009 in the former Blagards Kirke on the initiative of Paul Opstrup, director of LiteraturHaus, and Bjorn Ross, artistic director of the Copenhagen Renaissance Music Festival, who saw that Copenhagen - like other European capitals - needed a church devoted to music. When the church went on the open market in 2013, in the first public sale of churches in Danish history, the association fought a two-year campaign to buy it - raising over a million kroner by selling cooperative shares to musicians, local residents and the public, with support from the Maersk and Augustinus foundations and Realdania - and completed the purchase in summer 2015. The building is now owned by the cooperative KoncertKirken Blagards Plads A.m.b.a., refitted with stage, sound insulation, bar and audience facilities while keeping the room's prized acoustics. More than 1,600 concerts have filled the hall across every imaginable genre: renaissance and baroque, organ recitals, world music, jazz, electronic, noise, opera, cabaret, sound art and school concerts. The house doubles as a community anchor - it has long hosted a homeless feeding programme three times a week - and collaborates tightly with the square's libraries, culture houses and festivals, giving one of Copenhagen's most storied neighbourhoods a stage of international quality. The setting adds its own drama. Blagards Plads is one of Copenhagen's most distinctive squares - a sunken granite plain ringed by Kai Nielsen's carved figures of workers and craftsmen, flooded for skating in the old days and still the living room of the Blagardsgade quarter - and the church's tower closes its western end. Concert nights spill audiences onto the square in summer, folding the venue into the street life that its cooperative owners came from.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: Blagards Plads 6A, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2200

Website: https://www.koncertkirken.dk

Opening Date: 01/10/2009