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.
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