The Trinity Church, built in 2004, is the southernmost Russian Orthodox church in the world. It’s located on Antarctica’s island of Waterloo, on the territory of the Russian polar station Bellingshausen (named after the discoverer of the continent).
The Russian polar station appeared there in 1968, but the church was only proposed in the 1990s. The physical place for the church was chosen in 2002, but it took another two years to erect it here.
The building is made of cedar, larch and pine. Suitable wood was found near the city of Gorno-Altaisk in Siberia and the church was built by local carpenters. It measures 15 meters in height and can accommodate about 30 worshippers.
The church spent a year in Altai, and then was deconstructed and transported on trucks, first to Kaliningrad (Russian port on the Baltic), and then to Antarctica. There, in harsh conditions, it took 50 days for a team of 8 to reconstruct it again. Moreover, it was necessary to protect the walls from the local, almost horizontal rains, and also to stretch metal chains inside to secure it from severe winds.
In January 2007, the first wedding between a Russian lady named Angelina and a Chilean man named Eduardo. He worked at the station with her father, and then came to visit him in St. Petersburg, where he met his future wife. He accepted Orthodoxy, and she went to him in Antarctica.
Translated by rbth.com
Photo courtesy of mospat.ru
