Fr. John writes in Listvyanka overlooking the picturesque Lake Baikal.
As I write, I sit on the balcony of our room, overlooking the village of Listvyanka. Lake Baikal is a few hundred meters (yards) away. To say it is beautiful here, or picturesque does not do it duty.
Our train arrived in Irkutsk this morning on time, however it is calculated. Local time was about 6:30. We find a taxi driver who will drive us the 70 km (43 miles) to Listvyanka and off we go from the station.
Irkutsk appears to be thriving. We’ll pay it a closer look on Tuesday. It does look “clean,” which is how the driver describes it. The highway is lined with pines virtually all the way from town. Both dachas and the Mak-mansions of new Russian seem everywhere.
To our right, we see the River Angara, the only tributary flowing from Lake Baikal. In time, we see Baikal where it narrows and feeds the Angara. The Shaman’s Stone, sits in the middle where lake becomes river. Local Buryat lore explains the stone in mythological terms.
The village church in Listvyanka dedicated to St. Nicholas where we attended the Divine Liturgy today.
We arrive at our hotel at 7:45 where they explain that our room is not ready for us. This is no surprise. We pay our driver, stow our luggage at the hotel, and head off on foot to church. St. Nicholas Church is all of 0.5 km (one-third miles) from the hotel, just down the hill, cross two streets, and a small stream and we are there. (As far as I can tell, Listvyanka has three streets, plus the highway to town.) It is a well-kept brown and beige painted wooden church, capped with an octagonal dome and fronted with a smaller octagonal bell-tower. Both have blue metal roofs, while the church’s itself is green.
Almost no one seems awake. Roosters are crowing and evidence of recent horse traffic dots the gravel streets. We still have time to explore before liturgy begins, so off we go to see Baikal from the shore. On the way, we pass the entrance to the Retro Museum Park. We peak through the wooden fence. Ka’ren is intrigued and will want to return. I see things that remind me of my inheritance in Texas which I have been slowly getting to the town dump.
From the seawall — it sounds funny to call it a seawall, but what’s really a “lake wall” — we spot an onion domed church on the same knoll as our hotel. We go for a look and find that it’s a cemetery chapel, perched on the hillside overlooking Lake Baikal. A grave, freshly dug, lies empty. The grave of one of Listvyanka’s young men, only twenty-eight, is still covered with flower wreaths.
St. Nicholas’ bells have sounded and we head back toward church. By this time, Listvyanka’s canine population has woken up and at each turn, a new bark announces our arrival. Soon, it seems, all the dogs in the village know there are two new humans about.
Returning to church, it looks as vacant as before. True, the door is open and a car or two sits behind it. As we enter the grounds, we see two older men escorting an elderly nun across the walk, up the side steps, and into the church. Good, we won’t be the only ones there!
A shot of the village of Listvyanka, located about 70 kilometers (43 miles) from Irkutsk.
Of course, as we step over the threshold, we see a good portion of Listvyanka already at prayer. Liturgy is about to begin and the church is already half-full or more. The shape of the inside reminds me somewhat of Holy Resurrection Church in Berlin, NH. The majority of the nave sits under the drum of the dome. The nave itself is square. Floors are painted brown, and have been painted several times before. The iconostasis is white with gilded wood and realistic art for the most part. Two large cliros screens shield the small choir from view.
I can see at least two more nuns present. Could there be a small monastic house nearby? The congregation is older but reflects every age group in town, from toddlers up. Most worshippers stand separately to pray, men to the right and women to the left. Sixth Hour is concluding as we take our places.
Something tells me that this is the deacon’s first liturgy since ordination. If not his first, it is one of his first few liturgies. Any Orthodox deacon or priest can recall that first service after ordination. It’s a nervous time, and anything one knew or thought he knew about serving has suddenly been erased from his memory. To be sure, there is the sign that he is green: there is that seasoned priest standing nearby to whisper in his ear: Turn, bow, cross your self, here is your place, you need your prayer book, pick up your stole. It is all quite terrifying.
The senior priest was a man whose face had graced the portraits of a previous century (the 19th), his eyebrows busily jutting out into peaks at the outer folds of his eyelids, a full mane of hair flowing down into the back of his robe, his beard thin but long. The “seasoned priest” at the deacon’s side by contrast had a modish haircut, trimmed beard and tinted lenses in his eyeglasses, which remained dark though indoors.
The choir was composed of three women singing traditional melodies, many known to me, in their own version of three-part harmony. Sometimes it was descant, melody and alto; or was it tenor? What it lacked in resonance, it made up for with spunk. The congregation even whispered along from time to time, until the Creed and the Our Father. Then, it was everyone’s turn to let loose.
Finally, the deacon just sort of disappeared. He had started a litany without his prayer book: a cardinal no-no, even if one thinks he has it memorized. Like anyone else who thinks he does, he didn’t. So, the altar boy brings out his prayer book. Then, before finishing, the deacon goes back inside and the priest finishes that prayer for him. I don’t know what happened. It did seem that the deacon was having a bit of a problem with Slavonic, the language used for church services in Russia. Whatever, I felt sorry for the guy, and which of the clergy reading this can’t relate?
What was really wonderful today was to pray in a real, Russian village church. Forget the beauty of the great temples in the large cities for a while. One really felt the praying going on today, in spite of a new deacon’s trials, or a choir short on technique but long on spirit. I found out later that St. Nicholas managed to stay open during the Soviet regime. Although, we were told: “it wasn’t very popular to attend. Only the old went.”
Lake Baikal.
After church, breakfast and check-in, Ka’ren and I found time to relax before hiring a fellow to take us on the lake in his boat. It drops off sharply and before you know it, it was 200 meters (650 feet) to the bottom. In a lake whose depth reaches 1.4 km (4,600 feet), that’s not really that deep, but deep enough for me. (Chas. D. will be reading this back in State College and chuckling about my landlubber nature showing through. He pilots submarines. This was a small boat with a single propeller engine and an icon of St. Nicholas. Every wave that hit the bow, tossed us up, and then splat, flattened us down.)
We headed for the Angara, where suddenly the depth is down to a manageable 10 meters (33 feet). I could see the bottom, the water is so clear. From this point for about 1 km (0.62 miles) downstream, the Angara never freezes. Baikal will freeze to 1 meter (3.3 feet) thick in winter. Our navigator explained something about the flow of the water from the bottom of Baikal combining with the springs feeding the Angara at that point being the reason for its not freezing at this point.
The Hotel Baikal sits above the lake on the side of the hill. Khrushchev had invited Eisenhower to stay there and had the highway put in to accommodate him. Eisenhower never came, but locals still say that Eisenhower brought them the road anyway.
We circled Shaman’s Stone and then went further downstream towards an open-air museum of early Siberian architecture. In a bit, we see Boris Yeltsin‘s place, sitting empty but nevertheless heavily guarded, with restrictions against boat traffic coming too close.
A 17th-century era Russian Fort not unlike what St. Herman encountered along his missionary trek to Alaska.
We disembarked at the museum. For me this is now open-air architectural museum number four, at least. What is interesting here is the portion of an early 17th-century fort on display. Russians fortified their eastern frontier with wooden forts, just as we did the West. Whether St. Herman and company saw this fort it hard to say. But that he saw one or more like it, it a sure bet.
There are differences between Siberian log buildings and the ones in western Russia, too. Not the least is the fact that these sit on the ground, with plank-covered floors in the barnyards. There were also Buryat houses, wooden yurts actually, hexagonal in shape, some with sodden roofs. Their shape reminded me of Navajo hogans in the American southwest.
This evening, I finally made it to the banya. Ka’ren promised he wouldn’t hit me with birch twigs and I agreed. I found it very relaxing.
We will venture up the lake’s shore a bit tomorrow before heading back to Irkutsk. I still want to see nerpa — fresh water seals – and eat omul — a fish delicacy limited to Baikal. This has proved a wonderful spot for R&R that neither of us will probably see again. After all, we are half a world away from State College now.
By the way, today my son Nicholas turns 29. Happy Birthday, Nick! Many years!