Slovakia’s Ice Church is Attracting Visitors to ‘Heaven’

The soft coloured light which is streaming through a church, gives you a feeling of heaven no doubt, when you arrived at a place of worship, where instead of wood or bricks this chilly house of worship is perched among the snowy peaks of Slovakia’s High Tatra Mountains and is built from massive crystal-clear blocks of ice.

The ice replica of Saint Peter’s Basilica of Rome is placed at 1,285 meters above sea level, which is higher than any of Slovakia’s 4,158 churches, more than half of the churches are Roman Catholic. Though the church has not been consecrated, it looks like a real church.

Since 2013, ice sculptors have been exploring the Slovak Tatra mountain hamlet of Hrebienok every winter to build a Tatra Ice Temple or a replica of a famous church using only crystal-clear ice blocks. The sculptors have built 11-meter tall version of the 16th century Vatican Basilica this year.

A team of 16 sculptors from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Wales and the United States have worked for 12 hours a day for around a month to built this year’s ice temple. The venue now vibrates with the sounds of sacred music.

“I am glad to see people crossing themselves and praying inside”, says Slovak chief sculptor Adam Bakos. The interior of the temple is full of sculptures which are modeled on the works of Italian masters along with those of chamois, marmots and other wildlife native to the High Tatras. As Bakos added, “I gave them a free hand with the decoration, so each artist added their signature style to the sculptures”.

The building material, mainly 1,880 ice blocks weighing a total of 225 tonnes, was imported from neighbouring Poland. Rastislav Kromka, technical director of the Tatra Ice Temple says, “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”.

With an unusually warm winter, which also threatens to melt details on their sculpture, Bakos and his team have covered it with a geodesic dome which is measuring 25 metres in diameter. They have also installed refrigeration units to ensure a bone-chilling minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) to keep the ice solid. More than 15 carpenters helped the sculptors with their demands of stacking the ice blocks, each weighing 125 kilograms.

Last year one-fourth of a million tourists took the difficult ride up to the mountain to see the ice replica of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia.

Open annually from November until late April, the ice temple is also becoming a hotspot for destination weddings now. Head of Tourism for the High Tatra region Veronika Littvova says, “Here... we are perhaps the closest to our spiritual selves and our respective religions”. Veronika is so convinced that ice temple weddings lead to long and lucky unions, as she says, “Thanks to that huge amount of ice, I believe that marriages entered into here will be preserved and last forever”.