MOSCOW -- On a hot summer's day in the middle of this year, a group of residents from the village of Nariman in the Volgograd region of southern Russia decided to go swimming in the nearby Volga-Don Canal.
As they approached the canal, they saw, offshore behind the reeds, the onion dome of an Orthodox church, topped with a shining cross of gold. They heard bells ringing and the chant of an Orthodox liturgy."They thought it was a devil's spell, so they made the sign of the cross and ran away," Nikolai Agafonov, a priest, said.
But the villagers were not hallucinating. They had really seen a Russian Orthodox church, afloat on the canal on a barge 27 meters long and pushed by a tugboat. For five months after its consecration on May 22 this year, the church stopped at village after village along the Volga-Don Canal and the Don River.
Thousands of Russians, many of whom had never seen an Orthodox church in operation, attended church services, were baptized and even married in the floating church.
Agafonov is head of the missionary department of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Volgograd and supervisor of the floating church project, which received assistance from an international Roman Catholic charity "Aid to the Church in Need."
He told ENI he was delighted with the results. "When we saw people crying with joy [in the floating church], we understood that we had done the right thing. People who were nearly 70 years old came to confession for the first time in their lives. In every village we were asked to stay for good."
The floating church is now docked at a village where it will be used for services during the winter. When the ice melts next spring, the church will continue its journey, mooring for a few days in each village that has no Orthodox church.
Hundreds of churches in the Volgograd Oblast region were destroyed, many by the Soviet authorities during anti-religious campaigns, and many during the Second World War when Volgograd -- then known as Stalingrad -- was the site of a crucial battle between Germany and Russia.