At the beginning of the millennium, I came regularly from Cologne to Munich. I used to visit a girl who lived in concrete blocks opposite the Olympic Stadium, where Bayern still played on weekends. I will remember Saturdays in that area for the roar of the stadium.
I once came in with a cold. I had a feverish dream that night that I was walking around the Olympic Stadium. Behind some park I saw a small church. From her I heard a prayer in Russian. In front of the church, I spotted a bum picking up trash. He looked at me with sad, clear eyes and said: "Welcome to us!" It was the first time that someone out of pure peace welcomed me to this country. At least in a dream.
It rained all day, all around the concrete accentuated the blues of metropolitan blocks. Behind the stadium, the ostentatious headquarters of BMW could barely be seen. I left with a bit of a fever, I never returned to that part of Munich.
Later I read that Timofey Vasilyevich Prokhorov died in Munich on July 13, 2004. It was one Tuesday. In the newspaper I looked at a picture of the deceased who was known to everyone who grew up in Munich. I recognized the "bum" figure from my fever dream. Or maybe it wasn't a dream?
Then I realized that Timofey lived close to the blocks where I occasionally stayed at the time. If I had known he was a neighbor, I would have gone to visit him.
Back then, when Timofey, as everyone called him, lived his last years near the Olympic Stadium, he was so old that he was called the "Methuselah of Oberwiesenfeld". Apparently, back in 1994, when I was in Munich for the first time at Oktobarfest, he turned 100 years old.
The story with Don
Baćuška Timofej was born in January 1894. in the Rostov region on Don in a Cossack family. Everything I know about Cossack life, I learned in the great work of the Soviet literary Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov "Silent Don". With characters like Grigory Grishka Melekhov, Sholokhov brought me closer to an era full of fractures and the Cossacks' difficult fate.
And Timofey Vasilievich Prokhorov wore his Cossack cross right through that time. He became a monk. He faced the Great War as a twenty-year-old, three years later he witnessed the collapse of the Russian Empire, revolution and civil war. When the Soviet government dissolved the monasteries, he went to the city of Shakhti in the Rostov region. He got married. In order to feed his family, he delivered coal around town on a wheelbarrow.
And then came World War II. German troops occupied the Rostov region. In February 1943, the fortunes of war turned their backs on them. In the retreat, the occupiers confiscated his coal shovels and forced him to transport their wounded. He didn't even get to say goodbye to his family, wife, daughter Tatjana and son Aleksandar. The Germans released him 80 kilometers away, near Rostov. At that time, his wife gave birth at home. She gave birth to a healthy male child, she named him Vladimir.
"Go West"…
But Timofey will never return home. Later, he testified that he saw a pillar of light near Rostov, and the Mother of God spoke to him from the pillar: "Go west and build a church."
Timofey did not hesitate. He started. Because of this decision, he was later called a hermit, ascetic, hermit, hermit, hermit - eremítēs in ancient Greek means desert dweller.
There is craziness in his renunciation of his former life and unquestioning acceptance of the order to go west in the middle of the war to build a church - craziness for Christ's sake. Admittedly, he did not walk naked through the streets of Jerusalem for three days like the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, who warned people of the impending destruction of the city and slavery. But Timofey was of that type who is guided only by the fervor of faith within himself. He was ready for any sacrifice.
He passed through destroyed cities, burned villages, countries devastated by war. After a long time - the war was over - he arrived in Vienna. He wanted to fulfill the heavenly commandment, to build a church. But the city administration in post-war Vienna did not want a Russian church. He crossed thresholds, begged. Time passed.
In Vienna, he met Natasha, a woman who believed in his visions. Together they begged the Viennese bureaucrats. Without success. Timofey later testified that he turned to the Mother of God in despair and that he heard a voice telling him to go on. He obeyed, in 1952 he and Natasha left for Munich.
The capital of Bavaria was slow to remove the ruins of the war. In the north of the city, in an area called Oberwizenfeld, there was enough space to store a large amount of rubble. In the past, the area served as an artillery training ground with barracks, and since 1909 as an airport. Timofey and Nataša settled on the edge of that devastated area.
Church of the Peace of East and West
Taught by the Viennese experience, they didn't ask anyone anything. They started to build with their own hands from the ruins and waste. Timofey took the bricks out of the rubble, put them in a sack, loaded them on a cart. He would find discarded window frames and boards. He would take nails out of them, straighten them. First, a chapel was built. Well, the house. Well, the church. They covered her dome with silver chocolate paper. They called it the Church of Peace of East and West.
In 1953, Timofey had a vision again. Archangel Gabriel gave a sermon to the gathered people on the rubble hill behind the Church. Neither the neighbors nor Natasha saw anyone.
Timofey cultivated a garden around the church. Neighbors and passers-by gave him flower seeds. He would also plant the pits of the fruit that they ate. An orchard and a luxurious garden full of lilacs were created. Timofey set up beehives with bees.
In the decades of the country's recovery and the German economic miracle, Timofey became one of the most recognizable faces of the city. He and Nataša created an oasis where people gladly came to find peace and inspiration. Children on tricycles flocked to the bearded man, and he gave them apples. During the Cold War, a Russian hermit in the middle of Munich was proof that there was hope.
However, the shadow of progress loomed over that oasis. They were preparing for the Olympic Games in Munich. Oberwiesenfeld has been designated as the location for the Olympic complex. And that would mean that Timofey and Natasha would no longer have a home. The realized religious vision of the Russian immigrant would be razed to the ground.
Munich defends Timofey
The citizens of Munich revolted. The media sided with the "Olympic hermit". And the mayor advocated for the survival of the Church and the oasis of peace. The organizers relented. The Olympic Park, one of the most beautiful in the world, was moved a little further north, so as not to endanger the Church. The 1972 Olympic Games did not have the work of the Russian devotee on their conscience, it was preserved.
The media celebrated the decision to let the Russian weirdo stay in his house, at his church, calling him "the first Munich Olympic winner."
Children visit Timofey for the first time as adults. His son, Vladimir Timofeyevich Prokhorov, who was born in the Rostov region while he was under duress carrying German wounded on stretchers, became a doctor of technical sciences.
In that Olympic year, Timofey and Nataša got married. She died five years later. Her grave could not be next to the church - due to regulations that saw neither church nor cemetery on that land. Timofey buried Natasha in a Munich cemetery, but next to the church he arranged an empty grave with her name on it. He was often seen praying there.
Timofey's fame grew. One of Munich's most famous mayors, Christian Ude, in the 1990s called everything created by Timofey "the most charming illegally built building in Munich." That shouldn't come as a surprise. As a kid, Ude also ate apples from the hermit's garden.
One hundred and eleven years
Timofey started to get sick in 2002. This means that I could meet him healthy and active that very year when I was often in Munich. Now I feel guilty. I wish he had told me something about Gavril. And about Don. A man who was born in the 19th century, lived his life in the 20th century, and will die in this century, would certainly have something to tell me.
Timofej died on July 13, 2004 at the age of one hundred and eleven. He was buried at the West Cemetery in Munich. The house has been turned into a museum. An association was founded to take care of heritage. During his lifetime, Timofey appointed his successors - Sergej Kokasin and Aleksandr Penkovsky.
Kokasin confided to the German media how Timofey entered his life. In the early nineties, Kokasin was a businessman in Vienna. On the eve of a business trip to Munich, he dreamed of a gray-bearded monk in black robes. In Munich, his business partner told him everything about Timofey. Kokosin went to the house in Oberwiesenfeld. He stepped into the garden. The bees were buzzing. Timofey was sitting on a bench in front of the house. Kokosin winced. He recognized the monk from his dream. From that moment, Kokosin remains attached to Timofey and the place he created.
It seems that Father Timofey liked to come to us, ordinary people, in our dreams.
Fate did not favor the Church of Peace. Last summer, a fire broke out in it. Installation failure. The church was completely burned down. This caused grief in Munich but also everywhere in the world, where it was perceived as an "oasis of peace". The house with the museum, the chapel and the garden remained undamaged. Former mayor Kristian Ude and the Organization of the Peace Church of the East and West announced that the church will be rebuilt.
What Timofey left, convinced that he was fulfilling the will of heaven, is not just a building, but an idea of peace and love between East and West. That, in this time when weapons speak again where Timofeev was born, as well as around the world, may sound unrealistic, surreal or even naive - somehow out of time. But Timofey received the message of peace from a timeless dimension. He just passed it on to people.
Bonus video:
