A movable Orthodox church appears in the Irkutsk Region
4.08.2005 · English, Архив 2005
Archbishop Vadim of Irkutsk and Angarsk has consecrated a trailer church in the regional center. Now people in the remote parts of the region and in neighboring Buryatia will have an opportunity for coming to church at a nearest railway station.
The new church conforms to all the canons and traditions. Its only peculiarity is that it will run a railway. And this, clergy believe, is its indisputable value in the conditions of Siberian vast lands. Now the church sacraments can be administered to believers who live in remote villages in the Irkutsk region and Buryatia. ‘Today we give this movable church to the Irkutsk diocese in the hope that the spiritual joy that the Church brings to people will now come to families in the most remote settlements’, Aleksey Skachkov, the chief engineer of the Eastern Siberia Railway, said.
The movable church consists of two cars – the church proper and a living quarter for clergy and church workers. It was designed by the church art shop in Ulan-Ude; the wood-carving was executed by craftsmen in Yekaterinburg. All the necessary vessels were brought from the Moscow Region. A belfry is to be install at the platform of the trailer church a little later. Along with clergy, there will be conductors working in the trailer church. ‘We have not yet drafted an operating schedule, nor do we know who exactly will work here. But we would like to stay at the church because, indeed, it is a house of God’, Natalia Kudiukova, a special car conductor, says.
Early in September the trailer car, which will carry the relics of St. Innocent (Kulchitsky), will set off for a long procession with the cross through the Siberian and Far East regions in Russia. As the church has not yet a priest of its own, the supervision of the church car has been entrusted to Father Igor, rector of Sts Nicholas and Innocent Church.
At present the trailer church stays on tracks at the Irkutsk Passenger Station. But the clergy have given assurances that the car will not stay idle after coming back from the cross-procession.