In polar night, Norway-Russia kids event lights up Christmas
The children’s choir from the Lutheran church in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard traveled three hours each way by boat to mark Orthodox Christmas with the 40 children in Barentsburg, a village owned by Russia’s Arctic mining company in the remote Norwegian territory
BARENTSBURG, Norway (AP) — A 15-year-old boy in a polar bear hoodie took turns reading the Gospel passage about Jesus’s birth in Russian with three girls in dresses and bows who proclaimed it in Norwegian, in a shared celebration of Orthodox Christmas deep in the Arctic undimmed by war and the round-the-clock polar night.
The girls and a dozen of their fellow members of Polargospel, the children’s choir at the only church in Svalbard – an archipelago closer to the North Pole than to either Oslo or Moscow – traveled three hours by boat Saturday to mark the holiday with the 40 children in Barentsburg.
At midday in the snow-covered square of this village owned by Russia’s Arctic mining company, a full moon illuminated a bust of Lenin standing in front of a big, twinkling Christmas tree and an even larger old monument reading “Our goal is Communism” in Cyrillic script.
This far north, the sun never rises in winter.
