From the outside the church looks normal ...
...but inside it is a different story.

---

Lutherans work to turn a swimming pool back into a church

By Jake Bowman

The "Petrikirche" (Peter church), on Nevsky Prospect, founded under the auspices of Peter the Great to serve the mainly Lutheran German minority in St Petersburg is undergoing a renaissance after serving as a swimming pool for 30 years.

Closed in the 1930s by the Communists, in 1993 the church was restored to the Lutheran Parish of St Petersburg in 1993, which has since reopened it as a place of worship.

But even today, visitors entering the church are confronted by the half demolished Olympic-sized swimming pool that continues to dominate it.

St Petersburg's Lutheran parish is now run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Russia and other States (ELKRAS), an independent church that has its roots in Germany. The parish had been trying to reacquire the Petrikirche, known formally as the Church of St Peter and Paul, since 1990.

The church is situated on Nevsky Prospect, between Bolshaya and Malenkaya Konyushennaya Ulitsas, a site originally donated to the Lutheran parish of St Petersburg by Tsar Peter the Great in 1727. Today's church was completed in 1838, after five years of construction, on the site of the original St Peter's church of 1738.

Now the parish faces the daunting task of reconstruction.

In 1962, the Communists completed their slow destruction of the church. The last of the famous wall murals were painted over, the galleries removed to install bleachers, and in the main nave a giant municipal swimming pool was constructed.

It was far from the most ignoble use of the building during the Communist era. During WWII the church was used to store vegetables. Earlier it had been used as a studio for the preparation of cinema news reels, and before that, as a storage space for theater props.

After the closure of the church, most of the church's famous objects d'art were lost and the remainder were removed to the collection of the Hermitage, where they remain. The gilded dial-plates of the two steeples' clocks and the sundial, made by the master Tegelstein in 1837, were lost along with the golden inscription of the church's facade. Lost, too, was the church organ. The largest in Russia when installed in 1840, and said to be the best, it was responsible for the fame the church acquired as a concert venue.

Some of the funds for the church's restoration are being supplied by St Petersburg's city government -- on the condition that reconstruction be completed within 10 years, and that the church be restored as close as possible to its prerevolutionary appearance.

But the largest contribution comes from the Interior Ministry of Germany, as part of its support program for German minorities abroad.

Thousands of Germans emigrated to Russia during the reigns of Peter I and Catherine II. The influential minority, imported to construct Peter's city and to Westernize his country, lived mostly in St Petersburg, the city they helped to found, and in Moscow, and were allowed by Tsar Peter the Great to construct Lutheran churches in both cities.

Under Joseph Stalin, they were dispersed throughout the Soviet Union and persecuted. Although the language and religion survives in many of the smaller communities of the diaspora, especially Omsk, it has all but disappeared from the capitals.

But with the break-up of the Soviet Union thousands of Russian-Germans have been repatriated leaving an estimated 5 million more in the CIS.

This influx of German minorities from Russia and former Soviet bloc countries such as Romania - under the German constitution they can not be refused - has stretched a Germany pressured by the huge costs of rebuilding former East Germany and by existing minority groups such as the Turks.

Hence the German government's decision to spend money improving the lot of foreign Germans where they are now.

Rehabilitation of the Lutheran church in Russia, one of the core institutions of the German community here, reflects that policy.