Remote Parish

The first thing one is likely to see when approaching King Georges’ Island is the wooden cupolas of a 15-meter-high church, perched on the island’s coast. 

The idea of building a church in the Antarctic arose after Russia’s religious revival in the 1990s. The Orthodox chapel – Trinity Church –opened near Russia’s Bellingshausen Station on February 16, 2004, and held its first service on Trinity Day, May 29, 2004.

The church, which can accommodate 30 worshippers, was built in the Altay with weather-proof Siberian pine, then dismantled and shipped to Antarctica, where the Bellingshausen station staff assembled it. Renowned Palekh icon-painters made the iconostasis, and descendants of the exiled Decembrist Sergei Muravyov-Apostol donated the church bells.

Monk and priest Kallistrate served at Trinity Church for the first year and a half of its operation. He said he found the climate there warmer than in the Solovetsky islands, where he used to work, and said the station staff treated him well from the start, but that he didn’t become “one of them” until after his first winter in the Antarctic. 

The station’s director and one of the engineers were baptized on the day the church was consecrated. Three others have since been baptized there. 

“We started the baptisms with catechisms in the church, and then went to the ocean shore, sailed a rubber boat and I immersed the guys in ocean waters from there,” Father Kallistrate said. “It was cold, but what can you do?”