Saint Nicholas Church, Old Believer church in Ulan-Ude, Russia.
Saint Nicholas Church is a wooden structure featuring an iconostas designed to display 43 religious icons in its interior. The church contains a collection of icons, some original and some replacements, arranged within this sacred wall of images.
The building was constructed around 1900 in Nikolsk village and relocated to the Ethnographic Museum of Transbaikalia in 1971. This move preserved the structure after it had been repurposed as a warehouse for several decades.
This church embodies Old Believer traditions, representing a Christian community that broke away from Russian Orthodoxy during 17th-century religious reforms. The building itself serves as a living example of how this group expressed their faith through architecture and sacred art.
The church is located within the Ethnographic Museum grounds and can only be visited as part of a museum visit. Visitors should allow time to examine the interior details and the arrangement of icons carefully.
Empty spaces in the iconostas are filled with wood-toned canvas cloths to maintain visual balance where icons are missing from the collection. This creative restoration approach allows visitors to see both the surviving works and the story of what was lost.
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