Blue house, open door - Summer dreams for city birds.

At the beginning of the year, I wandered through Tegel and visited a small piece of Russian soil: the Russian Orthodox cemetery. The whole area has an interesting history, and it’s the only church of the Russian Orthodox community in Berlin-Tegel.¹

The initiative for the cemetery goes back to the “Bruderschaft des heiligen Fürsten Wladimir,” a brotherhood that is still active today. They bought the property for 30,000 marks in 1892, at a time when the Russian community in Berlin was growing. In addition to the cemetery and chapel, the brotherhood erected several buildings, including greenhouses, a typesetter’s workshop, and a library.² At the center of the graveyard stands the St. Constantine and Helena Church, built in 1894 as a replica of Moscow’s St. Basil’s Cathedral. The chapel once housed precious icons, but these were lost through robbery. I haven’t seen the chapel yet, but I’ve read that it has a beautiful iconostasis - maybe I’ll get to see it someday.