Käina

Käina was a parish centre on the island of Hiiumaa. Its stone church was built around 1500 during the episcopate of Johannes III Orgas, replacing an earlier place of worship. Originally dedicated to Saint Nicholas and later to Saint Martin, it became the focus of a parish whose institutional history reached back to the medieval division of the island between the Livonian Order and the bishop of Ösel-Wiek.

The church's fabric also records a difficult building site. Founded on layered clay, the structure began to subside and required powerful external supports. In 1660 Axel Julius De la Gardie gave the church six hundred hectares of land, making it a substantial ecclesiastical landowner. Seventeenth-century grave slabs preserve another part of the parish's social and artistic history. Church building, landed patronage and memorial stones together give Käina a distinct history within the Baltic island world.