The Russia we lost

9

I’ll show you something from which hair stand on end. Among the endlessly dull and monotonous Russian villages are useless monuments of history. Jewels roll under your feet, but do not notice them, trample, and even just crap, using as a toilet.

In the Tver region – hundreds of abandoned churches. Sturdy stone buildings, the best in these dead villages are rotting under the eternal rains.

In the 1930s religion was outlawed. In the cities the Church was blown up in villages remade in the barn. Have a deeply religious people, massacred the very essence and called to build a new world.

When the wind changed again, people stopped believing in communism’s collective farms were not needed.

Among the dying villages stand the ruins of a majestic Cathedral, a place that in the area of Imperial St. Petersburg, not in Tver wilderness. But where’s the trail of people caught a cold, nothing but woods and marshes. And only a gnawed skeleton of the Church reminds about the past.

This summer I drove through godforsaken places and was shocked by the scale of the disaster.

In the Tver region, about 1,000 churches. More than half of them abandoned. View map, here are a few of the areas from Rzhev to Kalyazin. All points are invalid churches. Purple marks where I had planned to visit.

Россия, которую мы потеряли

In this report, many galleries. To see all photos click: on the arrow

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