Rock Church

The story, as our tour guide told it, was that a new church was planned in the north section of the city of Helsinki. Residents had no complaint about the location of the church but were not happy if the facility were to be a tall building with high visibility. And the area where the Church was planned was an area of large rocky formations. Sounds like a real controversy until you arrive to see the result.

Apparently, everyone won in this situation as they blasted and dug the Church out from inside the rock. Called the Rock Church, this Lutheran Church runs a full slate of services every week in Finnish and also offers a 2:00 PM service in English. If our tight tour schedule had allowed it, I would have been most pleased to attend that service. If occasion sends us back to Helsinki on a Sunday in the future, the service will be pre-planned on our schedule.

What they have built is a beautiful hollow grotto in the rock. We will look at a couple more photos from the Rock in the next post.

Steeples of Tallinn

It occurred to me as we began our tour of Tallinn that I was visiting my first SSR. One of the 'overrun countries' of the Baltic, Estonia along with Latvia and Lithuania were the three countries known to me only as the three that were dominated by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s and then fell under the domination of the Soviet Union after that. More than a half-century passed before these people earned their freedom. We will have more on that topic in the next post.

Here I must comment on the beauty and the power of the steeples of Tallinn. For a country dominated by the officially-atheist Soviet Union, these churches are remarkably beautiful, kept up well, and welcoming. The Orthodox Church seen here, along with the Lutheran Church, were able to retain their identities and become once again places where Estonians can go in peace to worship God. It all made for a wonderful Thursday visit.

Sunday at the Lutheran Church

Standing in the courtyard, surrounded by the palace buildings in Copenhagen, the scene is dominated in one direction by the edifice of the beautiful Lutheran cathedral. On another day, we might have been invited in to see the interior, but we were there on a Sunday morning. Those inside were not tourists!

One of the most noted names in Denmark is an author. Do you recognize him from his statue? In much of the city, especially near the famed Tivoli Gardens, you will see his name or his visage. If you don't recognize him, his name is Hans Christian Andersen.

We will head for Tivoli in the next post.