Last Weekend

On the day trip last weekend, Nigel and I explored the Industrial site that was detailed in a previous blog post.  On our way back into the city we stopped at an abandoned Russian Orthodox church.  We parked the truck on the nearby road and walked a short distance in.  The last time that I was here, back in 2008, there was a beautiful altar screen with religious icons painted on it.  I included an image of the interior of the building in the Procession West show that toured western Canada from 2013 to 2017.  When we checked inside the old church today, we found that it was almost totally empty, with the exception of an old worn-out mattress tossed in the corner, and a bunch of dried plants hanging on the wall inside the door.

I decided that the building was more photographically interesting from the exterior now, and set up out there to take a shot.  I'm not sure what the proper term is, but there was once an ornament... not really a dome... more of a finial on top of the main peak of the church.  There was a similar one on the smaller domed cupola in behind.  The main one had fallen off and was laying in the grass beside the building.  I remember it being in the same spot on my previous visit 9 years prior.  I set up a composition with this fallen ornament in the foreground, with the old building and the trees as a backdrop.  While I was attempting to shoot this we were approached by a man that seemed more than a little irritated.  He was the priest from the nearby church that had been built to replace this old one.  I struck up a conversation with him and showed an interest in the history of the building and he was quickly at ease.  He offered up a little information... that there had once been a sawmill on this location, and a prisoner of war camp across the road.  He also spoke about some of the restoration efforts being undertaken at the nearby "new" church.  It turns out that those altar panels that I had previously photographed had been removed from the old building just that morning.  How ironic is that...!!  Nigel and I were wishing we had stopped here on our way out, rather than on our way back...!  They were being sent to another church to be restored and preserved.  What a coincidence and somewhat of a shame that we were a few hours to late.  

Here are a couple of snapshots taken during our recent visit, as well as a scan of the image that I shot here in 2008 and included in Procession West.  I have some even older images of the same building that I need to locate in my negative archive.  Another neighbor stopped by and visited with us while we were there and showed an interest in seeing my images.  I also need to process the image taken on this day with my view camera and see if it turned into something worthwhile.