EVS Stories: On big buildings (III)

Kiryl is working as a volunteer in Baia Mare, until the end of February! He shared some of his  thoughts with us, as impressions of his stay in our town.

Today I’m going to tell you about religion in Romania and, in particular, about the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Baia Mare. As I told in my previous publication, I don’t understand why such a large Cathedral is being built in such a small town as Baia Mare. Now I have even more questions…

As one of the international volunteers told me, the Cathedral is so large because architects had an idea to build the Cathedral which will be able to accommodate all residents of Baia Mare (approx. 135K!). When I heard about it, I was thinking that this is a quite interesting hypothesis, but this’s not enough, I need facts.

This weekend I was in Oradea (200 km from Baia Mare) and I found there a quite similar church in size and design – Church of Saint Ioan Iacob Hozevitul (its under construction just as the Holy Trinity Cathedral!). Then I decided to compare the two towns – the population of Baia Mare is approx. 135K versus approx. 195K  in Oradea. This comparative analysis shows that the hypothesis doesn’t work.

In fact, the hypothesis doesn’t make any sense, because the People’s Salvation Cathedral in Bucharest (which is under construction too!) – one of the largest and tallest Orthodox Churches in the world, according to the project, accommodate up to 8K people!!!

Now we know that there is no regularity between the size of the churches and the population of the towns.

Another interesting observation, all three large churches are under construction and, for instance, People’s Salvation Cathedral project was born at the end of the 19th century and the Cathedral is expected to be finished only in 2024.

As a result, these facts allow me to say that Romanians like to start building large churches, but they don’t like to finish them.

After the trip to Oradea, I understand people who say that Romanians have to spend more money on roads and railways but not on churches, because Romanian roads and railways need major repairs!

The volunteer is hosted by Team for Youth Association in a joint project with Office of Initiatives Promotions  from Minsk, Belarus, on a two-month European Voluntary Service project. The content of this testimonial does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. The responsibility for the information and views expressed in the article rests entirely with the author.