St. Daniel's underground temple

A large underground temple was dug by Orthodox monks on a steep slope in the floodplain of the Chumysh River between the Altai villages of Srednekrasilovo and Staroglushinka. The territory where a man-made cave complex began to grow at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is still called “priest’s meadows”.

Underground cells, an altar room, a hidden "prayer chair" and emergency exits connected the temple galleries up to half a meter wide. Some could be walked without bending, others - only sloping, and in some places - only crawling. Branched corridors went to a depth of 3 to 5 meters and stretched underground for a quarter of a kilometer. Niches of various sizes were carved into the walls of the galleries - for icons and candles. The large altar room was decorated with bas-relief images of the Mother of God and the Savior. Dormer windows were connected to the surface of the temple.

In the late 1970s, the underground passages were still passable, the vaults were intact. Crumbled structures of steel in the "zero". Cinder blocks at the main entrance and a narrow wood-lined corridor adorned the Temple of Daniel in 2000. They were made in anticipation of a possible visit to Patriarch Alexy. The high rank did not visit the caves, and the result of modernization was a collapse that destroyed the altar part of the complex. The crumbling of the corridors of the Srednekrasilovsky underground church continues, it is dangerous to enter it.