>>6335597I spoke with one of the locals. They reclaimed the interior and maintain it in it's current state. Now used for weddings and other similar community events.
He said this to me:
"This was a sacred place for thousands of years. Then the Germans came, and they broke our sacred stones and cut our sacred trees to make their buildings. Then the Soviets came and they broke the church with their war machines. When the Soviets left, we took it back. Now it is a holy place again."
In Latvia, when they say "and when the Germans came," they mean in 1205 when the Brotherhood of the Sword came to the Baltics on Crusade. Anyone who didn't convert to Christianity was put to the sword.
Church records of the time state, and I am not making this up, that there was a great infestation of werewolves in the region. For about 250 years the local churches received soldiers and armaments to fight all the werewolves. According to church records, thousands of werewolves were killed during this time ... and, apparently, the werewolves killed quite a number of German knights, as the church was in constant need of more.
It's not just the letters that survive between church administration that describe the requests and the descriptions. It's also all the accounting records that show the amount of money spent taming the Baltic wilderness of the Pagans and werewolves that infested it.
