Vishnevo pogost.

      Once arriving in the town of Kimry, I decided to take a little walk to the abandoned graveyard called Vishnevo.  It’s located in a forested area not far from the village of Ilyinskoe, which is fifteen kilometers from Kimry.

  The dirt road from Ilyinskoe to Vishnevo is in very bad shape.  You can see that it hadn’t been maintained at all.  In addition to large ruts and washed out sections, there were even some fallen trees across the road, so I had to leave my car and walk for a good length of the way.  The scenery along the way was quite scenic and interesting, with forests and swamps.

  There were channels covered in water lilies throughout the area. You can see that some of the swampy areas had been drained to extract the peat.

  A lovely, peaceful scene.

 Finally I arrived at the destination of my long walk--the Church of the Nativity and churchyard of Vishnevo. It was constructed way back in 1817, but during the Soviet time it shared the grim fate suffered by most of the country's churches.  Since that time it has continued to slowly deteriorate.

  Domes fell from the roof to rust on the ground.

  The Church was surrounded by an old cemetery, but most of the graves were overgrown with bushes and weeds. No one tends the graves.  Everyone who knew of these people have probably passed on as well.

  A majority of the monuments were erected prior to the revolution.

 All this splendor--a cemetery and temple located on the shore of a beautiful forest lake. The isolation has a positive effect—no garbage has been left on the banks by careless visitors or campers.

  Mature trees surrounded the temple building on all sides. Before too long, I’m sure that the roof will collapse and the place will return to Mother Nature. Prospects for the restoration of the temple look pretty bleak. There have been no any inhabitants there for a long time, and the Tver region is full of ruined churches, even in the more populated towns and villages.

  There was a lonely bed frame amongst the rubble in the ruins of the Church, and the walls were covered with inscriptions like "Here was Kolya, 1993."  Some of the graffiti was quite old, and the original frescoes have not been preserved.

  The abomination of desolation, or the aesthetics of withering?

   The vault still holds up.

  It's time to end the post. And I end it with cute photos of local plants. It's always good to end the post with random cute photos, isn't it?