Turkmenistan: Mary – Pokrovskaya Church

Not to be missed in Mary is the Pokrovskaya Church, an Orthodox Church, also known as the Church of the Intercession of the Virgin Mary. It was built around 1900 by Russian military after they seized the city in 1884. This red-brick church, featuring white ornaments, looks very colorful and quite lit of place in the dusty Mary. It was closed in the 1930s during Soviet rule, repurposed as a warehouse, but restored as a church in 1947 after World War II. It’s now a fully functioning orthodox Christian church, serving a mostly small Russian community.