Sacred ice sculpture
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.
Although it has not been consecrated, another visitor, Zlatica Janakova from Slovakia, says it feels like a real church.
“It’s so good for your soul; it provides you with tranquillity. All of nature is inside and around this temple,” she says, gazing at the surrounding alpine vistas.
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 replicas of a famous church using only ice blocks.
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 team of 16 sculptors from Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Wales and 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.
“I’m glad to see people crossing themselves and praying inside,” says Slovak chief sculptor Adam Bakos.
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.
“I gave them a free hand with the decoration, so each artist added their signature style to the sculptures,” Bakos said.
Slovak-Greek artist Achilleas Sdoukos designed and produced stained-glass decorations incorporated into the temple’s icy walls.
The building material, namely 1,880 ice blocks weighing a total of 225 tonnes, was imported from neighbouring Poland.
“We tried different suppliers, from the Netherlands, England, Norway and Hungary, but Polish ice seemed to have the highest quality, it really looks like glass if kept cold enough,” says Rastislav Kromka, technical director of the Tatra Ice Temple.
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 minus 10°C to keep the ice solid.
“Cold wind was blowing in our faces from the AC (air conditioner) all day long. Once we were done, I didn’t even want to open the freezer at home anymore,” he jokes.
More than 15 carpenters helped sculptors with the demanding task of stacking the ice blocks, each weighing 125kg.
“It took us more time to stack the blocks than to carve them,” Bakos said.
“Ice is also an extremely fragile material, you must be very gentle with it or details tend to fall off. We used only water to glue the pieces together,” he said.
Visiting the ice temple is free. It is funded by the Tatra tourism organisation, the transport and construction ministry and other partners.
Only cold air and water are used to maintain the ice church.
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 until late April, the ice temple is also becoming a hotspot for destination weddings.
“Here... we are perhaps the closest to our spiritual selves and our respective religions,” says Veronika Littvova, head of tourism for the High Tatra region, much of which is pristine and protected national parkland.