Kazakh senator appears in cathedral’s fresco

By James Kilner, Almaty
27/1/2012

A Kazakhstan senator was shocked to discover his face painted onto a Cathedral fresco depicting men welcoming Jesus to Jerusalem.

Sergey Kulagin was touring a new cathedral in Rudniy, in northwest Kazakhstan, near the Russian border, where until earlier this month he had been governor.

The centrepiece of the new cathedral’s interior was a large fresco on the dome depicting a group of robed and bearded men with Jesus.
But standing at the back of this crowd, clean shaven and jowly, was Mr Kulagin.

The fresco shows Mr Kulagin standing passively and wearing a pink robe with a blue sash. In front of him several men earnestly welcome Jesus, who is riding on a donkey. Behind Jesus are the 12 apostles.

The senator described the painting as “a sacrilege”.

“On January 14, we were opening the cathedral, and I noticed there was a picture there that looked like me,” Mr Kulagin told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in Moscow.

“Then I said to my guys, what are you doing? Erase it immediately!”
Rudniy is the headquarters of SSGPO, the former Soviet state’s biggest iron ore producer and a subsidiary of London-registered ENRC.
The Almaty-based Vremya newspaper reported that SSGPO had ordered Mr Kulagin’s appearance in the fresco but an ENRC spokesman, who also handles media enquiries for SSPGO, denied this.

“Though ENRC acted as a sponsor (for the new cathedral), the company had no involvement in the artistic direction of this project,” she said.

Father Andrey Kurayev, a well-known Moscow-based theologian, said that historically it was not unusual for the main sponsor of cathedrals to have their portrait on the walls.

Normally, though, this would be painted near the entrance or in another more anonymous position.

“It is right under the dome in the heavenly heights,” Father Andrey said of the picture of Mr Kulagin. “After the words ‘lift up your hearts’, the worshipper looks up to pray and sees ‘big brother’.”

Christianity is the second largest religion in Kazakhstan after Muslim, with more than a quarter identifying themselves as Christian. Most are Russians who belong to the Russian Orthodox Church.

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