The russian cemetery in Tegel

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.

Light Installation on cemetery

Yesterday i visited the Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof in the Chausseestraße¹. Besides the graves of famous people like Bertolt Brecht, Borsig, Hegel or Christa Wolf, the cemetery features an interesting chapel. Built between 1927 and 1928, the chapel was destroyed during the Second World War and later reconstructed in the GDR, based on the testimonies of contemporary witnesses. In 2013, the chapel was renovated, and the opportunity was taken to contact the light artist James Turrell - one of the key figures of the Light and Space Movement.² Together with the Berlin-based architecture bureau Nedelykov Moreira,³ the interior was redesigned to support Turrell’s site-specific vision.