Slovakia’s ice church will leave visitors breathless
HREBIENOK (Slovakia): A young nun breathes deeply as she peers up at a statue of an angel bathed in softly-coloured light streaming through a church, and as she exhales, you can see her breath.
Instead of wood or bricks and mortar, this chilly house of worship perched among the snowy peaks of Slovakia’s High Tatra Mountains has been built from massive crystal-clear blocks of ice. At 1,285m above sea level, the ice replica of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome is higher than any of Slovakia’s 4,158 churches, more than half of them Roman Catholic.
Englishman Martin describes it as a “beautiful, religious place, so peaceful and calm”.
Since 2013, ice sculptors have flocked to the Slovak Tatra mountain hamlet of Hrebienok every winter to build a Tatra Ice Temple, or scaled-down replica of a famous church using only crystal-clear ice blocks, imported from Poland.
This year, it’s an 11m-tall version of the 16th-century Vatican basilica, complete with the imposing two half-circle wings of Bernini’s colonnade.
A quarter of a million tourists last year took the short funicular ride up the mountain to see the ice replica of Barcelona’s soaring and intricate Sagrada Familia.
A team of 16 sculptors from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Wales and the United States worked 12 hours a day for a month to create this year’s ice temple.
On Sundays, the venue vibrates with the sounds of sacred music concerts.
The interior boasts sculptures modelled on the works of Italian masters side by side with those of chamois, marmots and other wildlife native to the High Tatras.
With an unusually warm winter threatening to melt details on their sculpture, Bakos and his team covered it with a geodesic dome, measuring 25m in diameter.
They also installed refrigeration units to ensure a bone-chilling -10°C to keep the ice solid.
Visiting the ice temple is free. It is funded by the Tatra tourism organisation, the Transport and Construction Ministry and other partners.
When winter is over, the ice structure is smashed to pieces, the cooling system switched off and the ice carried outside to melt on the ground.
Open annually from November to late April, the ice temple is also becoming a hotspot for destination weddings.