POSTCARD: ST. PETERSBURG : Bells Sound Rebirth of Lutheran Church

On a walk down this city’s million-ruble mile, Nevsky Prospect, one cannot help but notice, just behind the Koff beer garden, a magnificent early 19th-Century Lutheran church with two bell towers and a cross that dates back to, oh, about June 29.

From this church once emanated some of the world’s most inspiring music, played on a famous organ that since has disappeared.

The sound one hears now is of jackhammers.

A look inside reveals an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

One also sees a lot of dust as construction workers labor to remove the pool and convert the main floor back into a chapel.

This is being financed by the World Council of Lutheran Churches, which, in its pleas for donations, calls the project the “Reconstruction of the Swimming Pool Church.” The original name, St. Peter’s Lutheran, might have been more reverent, but let’s face it, it does not get your attention like Swimming Pool Church.

According to the church’s youth pastor, Markus Eisele, German laborers who were recruited to help Peter the Great build this city in 1704 established the first Lutheran church in St. Petersburg. St. Peter’s was built in 1838 and at one time had 17,000 members.

But religion was discouraged after the 1917 revolution. In 1938, St. Peter’s pastor, the last of the Lutheran faith in St. Petersburg, was deported, and his church became a warehouse for fruits and vegetables from nearby collective farms. Twelve years later, it was converted into a swimming pool that, over the next three decades, served as the site for numerous national and international competitions.

The pool, however, eventually fell into disrepair, and in 1991, with the fall of Communism, the building was returned to the Lutherans. Eisele, of Heidelberg, Germany, said they found a few faithful in the city as the religion was surreptitiously kept alive by their parents and grandparents.

They also found that the four bells in the towers sounded as joyful as ever, perhaps more. They were the only ones in the city that were not melted down for munitions during World War II.

“We like to think it was because of the Grace of God,” said Mike Byerley of Houston, one of 93 Lutherans here from Texas to assist with the reconstruction.

On June 29, when the church was reopened for daily prayer services in a small room off the foyer and the new cross was erected, the bells were heard throughout the city for the first time in seven decades.