Country Surprises

 

Driving the back roads is the adventure de jour.  Cresting hill, sprawling ranch in the valley below, cattle grazing the meadow and overhead floats the hawk.  Classic pastoral scene on the canvas of the minds eye.

Turning the corner are other treats for the eye.

Peering through the tangled mass of wind blown trees is the spire of a country church.  Windmill stands sentential as time floats by.

Further on is a mute reminder of other times.  The cemetery adjoins the church.  The settlers established their heritage as they settled the prairie.  Their homeland was with them for they had worked the dirt.  From the dirt they came, to the dirt they returned.  These are not the Western Europeans, look at the cross.

 

On another hill sits a chapel and atop the steeple sits the unusual cross.

Here was a community from Eastern Europe fleeing the turmoil of their homeland and the tyranny of the  Marxists.  When they fled the Marxists they brought their religion with them along with their culture.

 

The Orthodox Church is one of the oldest Christian Churches in the World.  It sprung from the churches Paul started in Asia Minor and Greece.  The Orthodoxy was started about the same time the catholic church in Rome begun.  The roman church spawned the Christian churches, for the most part, that are in the USA, Lutheran, Anglican, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Roman Catholicetc.

These people along with the Germans in the Volga area fled Russia when Katherine was deposed and  many more fled when Lenin the Marxist came to power and began the slaughter of dissidents.

It is an unusual page in world history.

 

Amazing what I can stumble across when I go on a cruise about the roads of hinter land.