Eklutna, Alaska, August 11, 2026
Old St. Nicholas Church in Eklutna and a shrine to the Theotokos. Photo: Wikipedia
A three-year effort to stabilize and preserve the 19th-century Old St. Nicholas Church, the oldest standing building in the Municipality of Anchorage, has wrapped up.
Russian Orthodox Sacred Sites in Alaska (ROSSIA), the group behind the project, says the church has been lifted from its original foundation to stop further rotting, with a new, stable base built in its place while keeping the structure’s original form intact. Only the base logs that had deteriorated too badly to save were replaced, and those were matched to the original design.
The work was funded by a $350,000 grant from the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Fund, part of the Department of the Interior. ROSSIA says the grant covered specialized architectural, engineering, and archaeological services needed to keep the church’s standing on the National Register of Historic Places intact.
Photo: Wikipedia
Beyond the structural work, an icon specialist and conservator went through the church’s religious artifacts, documenting and photographing icons, textiles, and other three-dimensional objects to create a physical record of the building’s history.
Built around 1870, the church sits within the Alaska Native village of Eklutna, about 25 miles northeast of downtown Anchorage. Its cemetery blends Russian Orthodox tradition with Dena’ina Athabascan custom, with three-bar Orthodox crosses standing among spirit houses built over graves so the deceased’s spirit has a place to reside. Some of the spirit houses are simple, while others have painted roofs, gables, and even chimneys.
The church stopped serving as the village’s main sanctuary in 1962, when a new church building took over. Since then, the old church has held onto religious artifacts and icons depicting Biblical figures and events, many of them gifts from the Russian Imperial Mission Society, which was founded by Russian tsars to support Orthodox mission work in Siberia and Alaska.
ROSSIA notes that the project followed the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties throughout, and that it adds to a broader effort to preserve Alaska’s Russian-American heritage, which includes more than 35 historic churches across the state.
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