Alaska Day Five--Sitka

“…that we may dwell in amity and peace forever in this region.” ~ Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov, First Colonial Governor of Russian America

We’re in Sitka today (Sept. 21st)—a new to us port of call. This tiny town is located on an island about equidistant from Seattle and Anchorage. In other words, it’s a long way from anywhere.

Back when Russia owned Alaska, Sitka was known as New Archangel and was the capital of the Russian territory. I’ll bet they’ve regretted selling their interest in Alaska to us many, many times, but I’m sure glad they did. I run out of superlatives pretty quickly when I try to describe its natural beauty, but it’s also so rich in precious metals, in fur and fish, timber and oil deposits. The fact that so much of the state is inaccessible is probably why it’s still so pristine.

Sometimes, the Eurodam is able to pull right up to the main part of our port of call. However today, we had to take a shuttle from our berth in a commercial port in to town. But even the commercial port is interesting. It is, after all, how life on this island works. Since it’s an island, if you don’t bring it with you, it’s not there. Everything has to be shipped in. I didn’t see a smidge of cultivated land. I assumed groceries were pretty spendy and our driver confirmed that a gallon of milk costs $7.00. 

Once we hopped off the bus in the center of town, we followed our map to the St. Michael’s Cathedral, a Russian Orthodox Church. The original building burned to the ground in the ‘60’s, but the congregation rebuilt an exact replica of the original to replace it. And more importantly, they saved a number of their icons before the first cathedral was destroyed by fire.

Several of the icons have unique stories attached to them. This one of the Archangel Michael was originally lost in a shipwreck about twenty miles from Baranov Island where Sitka is located. About a month after the ship went down, the icon was discovered standing upright in shallow water by a bunch of school children. It was amazingly undamaged by its month bobbing around in the Northern Pacific.

This Madonna and Child is known as the icon “not made by hands.” According to legend, the artist was frustrated with his inability to make the hands of the Virgin and the Christ Child look as he wanted, so to cover his errors, he slapped black paint over the places where the hands should be and went to bed. The next morning, the hands had been finished beautifully.

Sounds a little like the shoemaker and the elves, doesn't it?

Here's a closer look at Madonna's hand:

Across the street from St. Michael’s, there’s a historic Lutheran church as well. Originally it was built to please the Finns the Russians had brought to work on the island. The Russian Orthodox Church funded the building of the Lutheran church and even paid the salary of a Lutheran pastor, on condition that it couldn’t look like a church and there would be no proselytizing. The ELCA church was supposed to be strictly for the Finnish residents of Sitka. Since this church too had been lost to fire once, there wasn’t much to take pictures of inside except for the teeniest pipe organ I’ve ever seen. It had no foot pedals and only one small keyboard an octave or two shorter than a piano’s. When the fire that destroyed the Russian Orthodox and the Lutheran Church broke out, a couple of parishioners managed to haul the little organ out of the burning building. Even so, those Finns must have been more than devout. They had to be seriously ripped to be able to carry out an organ!

When we travel, I’m always drawn to places people have marked as sacred. From the Medicine Wheel on a mountaintop in Wyoming to the glorious St. Paul’s in London, I appreciate the sense of wonder, of reaching up to the divine in these special locations. I enjoy being quiet in them, listening for that still small voice. The whole concept of worship, of connecting with our God, is something that makes us uniquely human.

Now if only that connection would help us all live out the quote at the top of this blog:

“…that we may dwell in amity and peace forever in this region.” 

~ Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov, First Colonial Governor of Russian America