Local photographer Greg Raskob may not be with us any longer, but his work lives on at the Humboldt and District Museum. It’s home to a display of his photos of Saskatchewan churches with the purpose of educating the public about architecture and the importance of church to the community.
“Churches play a pretty significant role in the history of most communities in Saskatchewan and they play a significant role in the history of Humboldt,” said Jean Price, program co-ordinator at the museum and gallery.
The exhibit shows the architectural differences in different types of churches. For example, Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox churches have a Slavic influence with onion domes, while United churches are almost all built in the shape of an L or a square with a tower. Anglican churches have a lot of stone and towers on the front, meant to look like little English churches.
“They put features of English country churches around them in the yards that are pretty nonfunctional in Saskatchewan because the weather’s so different,” Price said. For example, Anglican churches sometimes have lychgates, which were for people carrying coffins to protect them from the rain when they stopped and prayed.
”Which isn’t so much an issue in Saskatchewan, but keeping out of -40 is a bit more concerning,” she said.
Raskob donated about 200 pictures to the museum. Of these, staff chose pictures that best represented the architecture highlighted in the exhibit, were most historically significant, and had the most artistic merit.
“We did an exhibit last year with the elevators that focused on them as photographs and we exhibited them in the gallery, so we decided for the churches we would take this more historical and architectural approach and give a lot more context about what was driving the building of these churches,” Price said.
There are a great variety of churches in the exhibit: as stated above, there were different denominations, but also churches from different places (Delisle, Dundurn, Fish Creek, Deer Creek, etc.) and churches that are both in use and churches that have been closed or torn down. He also took pictures of churches close to home. For example, one picture shows the Marysburg Assumption Church altar. Most Catholic altars were destroyed after the Second Vatican Council met to discuss relations between the Catholic Church and the modern world. Marysburg decided to keep theirs, and now there are very few left in the world.
“One thing I learned is I never realized how different the architectural styles within the denominations were,” Price said. “I hope (attendees) take a little bit of that away, and just take away the impact that churches of different denominations had on the landscape and the history of the settlement of Saskatchewan. Most of the churches are from fairly small communities and they’re fairly large, significant buildings, so that sort of attests to the importance of religion in people’s lives.”
