The Ministry of Emergency Situations is going to “legalize” the Neopalimovskaya church, built 17 years ago on the territory of the 11th fire station at 17 Lesnoy Prospekt, in the near future. At the end of 2019, the head of the judicial and legal department of the Construction Supervision Service reported to the Kanoner edition about this. Mikhail Stoyka…
The other day, the first deputy head of the St. Petersburg Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations Dmitry Legenky explained that the land plot under the fire department was officially transferred to his department in January 2020, but “a capital construction object of cult significance” was not included in the list (since formally “does not exist”). That is why the Main Directorate initiated work on putting the building of the temple on the cadastral register and “forming the address” for the above object. Whether this will be done through the courts (as is usually done in cases of private “unauthorized construction”) or otherwise, is not yet specified.
The Kanoner portal at one time clarified that the law directly prohibits the authorities from filing claims in court for the demolition of religious unrestrained structures. However, earlier, the official representative of the judicial-legal department of the building supervision service explained to the same publication that the presence of crosses “does not mean the cult status of the building”: for this, at least, it is necessary that the land under the temple be used by the parish.
In this case, access to the Neopalimovskaya church from the side of Lesnoy Prospekt is not closed, and yet the area around it belongs to the “regime” fire department.
Let’s add: the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God “The Burning Bush” was built in 2003. The construction of the temple was timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the professional fire brigade, and funds for this were allocated by the State Fire Service Department. The building was designed by the architect Olga Borovitskaya according to all the canons of Orthodox church architecture and has obvious artistic merit, especially against the backdrop of ordinary buildings on Lesnoy Prospekt.