Climber on the dome
Father Vladimir Pravdolyubov serves in the Kasimov Cathedral, is the rector of the Holy Cross Church in the village of Balushevy-Pochinki, and since last year has been actively involved in the parish of the Kazan Church in Betino.
The Kazan Church was closed in 1937, shortly after the arrest of the last rector, and since then began to collapse. Like many closed village churches, it was used as a warehouse for grain and fertilizers, but then it became no longer needed in that capacity. The doors and windows were gone, the exquisite murals were destroyed by rain and snow, painted by young people who had a smoke break here before going to the movies or dancing at the village club next door.
The club still stands in place, about 30 meters from the temple, boarded up long ago. And work has been in full swing around the Kazan Church for several years now.
In the Pravdolyubov family for 300 years, all men on the paternal side become priests. Four Pravdolyubovs were glorified in the Cathedral of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, more than a dozen today are clergy in Kasimov and Moscow. But Volodya, the great-grandson of the Hieromartyr Sergius Pravdolyubov and the son of the Kasimov archpriest, did not want to be ordained, he wanted to work with cars, from the age of 13 he was driving around Kasimov in a car without even a license. Vladimir, according to him, made almost no preparation for entering Sretensky Seminary, and before leaving for Moscow, after praying, he decided: if I pass the competition, I will become a priest. Passed. By the end of his studies, he didn’t even have a bride, and he again decided: if I don’t find her before graduation, I’ll go to university after seminary. Two weeks later he met his future mother and after that, he says, “he finally stopped twitching.”
Father Vladimir Pravdolyubov
...Having received the problematic assigned church at his disposal, Father Vladimir began to fulfill his obedience not too zealously - he served prayers as expected, donations were gradually collected at the services, and it did not seem that the work of restoring the rapidly deteriorating memorial church could somehow move forward . The building, which had difficulty surviving the change of seasons, first of all needed to clear the half-faded roof and install a temporary protective…
And suddenly Father Vladimir, in his words, felt that everything had somehow begun to be resolved without him.
His main assistant in the temple today, Andrey, a first-class sports mountaineer and an industrial climber with considerable experience, who did high-altitude work on many temples in the area, could not calmly look at the dome overgrown with trees every time he drove past Betin. And he began high-rise work on the dome with an ax in his hands, cutting down white birch trees there. Then he strengthened the dilapidated stone “glass” on which the dome should stand, covered the dome with iron, hanging on ropes, painted the “glass” - and now a new chapter on a blue and white leg rises above the neatly cleared and covered vault of the temple.
The dome itself was made as a temporary option for another church, but it was done inaccurately, it remained unclaimed - and Father Vladimir decided to take it for himself, and when the dome was lowered onto the drum, it fit like a glove, the gap between the “glass” and the top turned out to be no more than 10 centimeters!
It was the Betinsky church that was proposed by the diocese for a partnership project with the White Iris charitable foundation, which won a grant to conduct research work on rural churches - and the condition of the Kazan church was assessed by restorers from Moscow, who provided the diocese and the rector with recommendations for further work with the temple.
Father Vladimir is surprised how, for little money, he managed to “close” the temple from above, install double-glazed windows, straighten the central wall, and so on, and believes that there is no merit here - but the heavenly intercession of the Holy Martyr Eugene, who was shot in 1937 and the last rector of the temple, glorified by the Church. Over the course of a year, the priest traveled 20 thousand kilometers between Kasimov and Betino (40 km from each other), and the temple today is practically ready for winter. We have already bought a stove, we need to install a door and close several openings in the walls that have not yet been sealed...
Festive meal after the Divine Liturgy
During the liturgy for the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, the clearing next to the Kazan Church was so filled with cars that it was impossible to leave.
Find and Recreate
In the Kasimov diocese there are few newly built churches, but many are old, with a rich history; among the latter, a quarter are poorly maintained, ownerless, abandoned. One of the initiatives of Bishop Dionysius, newly installed in 2011, was to understand how many church buildings there are on his territory and in what condition they are. One of the first in the Church to create here was a commission for the construction, restoration and preservation of monuments, which did a tremendous job: compiling a complete register of them. Dilapidated, dilapidated churches were - within the framework of the general diocesan project-winner of the Orthodox Initiative "Treasures of the Meshchera Region" - filmed, described, exhibited on the website https://kas-nasledie.ru created specifically for this (many were even found, completely forgotten, in abandoned villages) are shown in photo exhibitions. This work continues today.
And the question arose: what to do so that temples could be recreated in the walls overgrown with weeds and under the domes pierced by time. In order to move the situation forward, it was decided to clearly define the boundaries of the parishes - and this made it possible to link nearby abandoned churches to the existing ones. And the rectors of existing churches received a special obedience: at least once a month they held services in the former church premises, organized local residents to tidy up the area around and inside the church walls.
“Where prayer begins, old walls come to life, miracles happen there,” said Bishop Dionysius.
Thus, the Church of the Kazan Mother of God in the village of Betino, one of the main and most exquisite examples of the Empire style in the Ryazan region, found owners and began to be revived.
