Niðaróss (Nidaros)

Nidaros — modern Trondheim — is the town where St Olaf was buried and venerated, the spiritual capital of Christian Norway. Here the saint's body lay, and here Olaf Kyrre raised the great stone Christ Church directly over his grave, setting the altar above the place where the king had first been buried and making it the centre of the cult that would become the cathedral of Norway. Around the saint's shrine the miracles were told and the kingdom's faith took root. Nidaros is the corpus's image of the holy heart of Norway — the northern town where a slain king became a saint, where the new faith was housed in stone over his grave, the place toward which the whole long arc of the conversion finally comes to rest in worship and a cathedral.