The oldest and most massive of the Visby churches is dedicated to St. Lars, or Lawrence; it was evidently raised in the early years of the twelfth century, nine hundred years after its patron had suffered on the grid. Though with windows unglazed and bare of any fittings the structure is very tolerably perfect and, as one first enters, the effect is exceedingly impressive and also extremely oriental. Greek merchants raised it; they had seen Byzantine churches in the East and desired in the cold North to reproduce their effect.[82] [Illustration: S. LARS] [_Face page 166_ Only a narrow court separates this church from another, which a generation later men raised to the honour of St. Drotten or the Triune God. Some idle person once invented an absurd tale (reminding one of that concerning the twin steeples at Ormskirk) that these sister churches were raised by two rich sisters who were such bad friends that they would not even kneel under the same roof to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. The actual plan is very similar to that of St. Lars, but it does not seem to have been so successful.[83] The Church of St. Olaf (Swedish Olof) appears to have been of very similar character; there the Norway merchants used to pray.[84] The scantiest ruins survive in the Botanical Gardens. Thither the citizens resort in summer to eat their meals and listen to a band. The same plan is reproduced in St. Clemens,[85] whose patron saint has an anchor for his badge and likes his churches to stand by the sea. The south porch evidently formed a _vapenhus_, or house in which weapons might be left: this was a common feature of the churches of the North, for thus it is written in the ancient Icelandic Law Ecclesiastic. "Men shall not bear weapons in church or oratory that is licensed for service to be held in, and they shall not set them against the church gable or the church walls. And these are reckoned weapons under this head--axe and sword and spear and cutlass and halberd."