Anti-aircraft battery at St. Isaac’s Cathedral during the siege of Leningrad. Photo: RIA Novosti
The television premiere of a film about Leningrad churches, which operated in the years of the great Patriotic war, will show viewers on the channel “Saint-Petersburg” September 8 – to 77-th anniversary of the beginning of the siege of the city on the Neva. This was reported TASS the head of communications of the St. Petersburg Metropolia Natalia Rodomanova.
“Our view of the blockade is quite a serious and extensive, however, because of certain historical conditions, when the Church was in a state of persecution for a long time all the information related to the life of the Church in the besieged Leningrad, he was totally not in the field nor scientific knowledge, nor learning,” said Rodomanova, adding that such data still remain inaccessible to the General public.
The TV show talks about the siege of Leningrad churches, and about the fate of the priests and the faithful, Patriotic and spiritual work of the Russian Orthodox Church during the great Patriotic war. “Ten churches acted during the siege on the territory of our city and its surroundings. Astonishingly, nine of them have survived to the present day: four of them were cemetery churches, and three of those nine temples that have survived today – wood,” said Rodomanova.
The film shows those temples that were built at the turn of XX and XXI centuries, where also “anxiously preserved the memory of blockade, where not interrupted prayer for those people who left,” she said. Among them are the temple of the Holy martyrs Adrian and Natalia in Staro-Panovo, which is a temple-a monument to all the dead and missing in the defense of Leningrad. It was erected in 2000-ies near the place, where the homonymous Church, completely destroyed during the war years because they were stationed on the front line. As told by its rector, Archpriest Mikhail Strelnikov, the temple established exhibition and a Memory Book where everyone can write a story about relatives who fought at Leningrad, for their remembrance in prayer.
Rodomanova noted that the film also featured a genuine letter that was sent by the resident to the ruling during the war years, the Metropolitan of Leningrad with a request to contact the authorities about the opening of access for believers chapel Xenia of St. Petersburg on Vasilievsky island. “It [the chapel] was not yet glorified, but was deeply revered, we already know, and in the nineteenth century and in the XX century. There is a lot of evidence, and we bring them to the film, that people went there in winter and summer, left little notes” – she said.
According to the film’s Director, Svetlana Galkinoj, the duration of the project is 45 minutes, the shooting lasted for six weeks. It used little-known photographs, military chronicle, personal and Church archives, the memories of descendants, fragments of conversations with renowned historians, clerics, Museum and archival workers. As noted by the film-makers, some of the facts and documents will be discussed for the first time.
About the siege of Leningrad
The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944. During this period the city was released about 150 thousand shells. During the siege of hunger, cold, bombing and shelling has killed, according to various estimates, from 643 thousand to 1.5 million people. The exact number of victims in the besieged city historians find it difficult to call until now.